Timo:

Yeah, I agree!  CSS2.1 is bad and since it is not even implemented the same in the different browsers it is even worse.  CSS3 will help, but there are still a lot of areas  (such as how overflow is handled) not even that will replace the simple elastic tables.  The sad part is how long it will take before it is ever implemented, we may all be using WPF/E by then :)

What would be really great is if people would get together and give use a new standard which fixes the issues and then have an agreement on all the top 100 sites on the net to not only use them, but block people from using a browser that is not current.  That would force the market to be all in agreement with the same standards and give us all a break.  Of course that will never happen.  It reminds me of a saying I made back in 1976 "a dreamer's only pain is reality".  Now that I have dreamed, I have to face the reality of tables ;)

>And yes, banning non standard browsers would be really nice, in fact I have considered creating a skinobject that warns people with IE < 6/Netscape 4 to either upgrade to IE7 or use FF.<

That would be interesting, at least on my own sites.  From some of my site logs, it appears that it is almost even the number of people using IE 6 as is IE 7.  Only a couple people use anything less than IE 6.  Firefox however is gaining fast on IE and at my HintsAndTips.com site is already up to 27.25% which is starting to really crimp in on IE.  Of Firefox, most (69%) are using a 2.x version but almost all are using 1.5-2.0.  Both Firefox and IE account for 96% of the traffic.

It would seem that a person could stop supporting anything before 6.0 without any hardship to traffic.

A little off topic, but how do you test for compatibility on your skins from other browsers such as anything prior to 6.0 or on other platforms.  For me, I usually use Virtual PC.

>I'll have a look if the box overflow problem has been discussed there.<

Yeah, if there was a cure for overflow that would be good, but I think a better solution would be if either the table tag took another parameter to specify layout or data, or if they just implemented a new tag "grid".  CSS is an optional presentation layer and things such as overflow can help, but it sure would be nice if the base XHTML added a new tag to build complex grid layouts without having to build it cell-by-cell, which is what we try to do with DIVs.  I guess we actually build cell-by-cell without a containing row or column to keep the cells in place.

For the next couple of years though, I think we will see a lot of skins still using tables to handle these issues.  I do not happen to see a solution around them.  If if the standards bodies changed to add anything, we will be living with legacy versions for ages.  Oh well, tables will sure make my life easier at knocking skins over the next few weeks :)