Several years ago, in my XML period, I read some book I can't remember about doing web design the "proper way", and have fealt a little ping of guilt every time I've used a table for layout purposes (very rarely now) since then.

The thing is, it's soooo easy to use tables for layout. I'll go so far as to say that I've not worked with a single developer that resisted the temptation to just use tables for layout since reading that book. A few (maybe 10%) of the developers I know and have worked with actually feel guilty about it (and know the difference), but most couldn't give a flying flux capacitor.

This has often led me to have deep reflective moments, where I ask myself questions like, "if I use floats and divs to do layout and no one notices, does it really matter?" or "why do I care about this stuff? Why! Why can't I just let it go and be like the other developers?" and "Why does it hurt when I use tables? Is it me?"

Just yesterday, I was having this conversation with my current BDFF (best developer friend for life) Michael. He came out and expressed his guilty feelings for doing table layout. We talked about using floats and divs and both agreed that it was confusing and easy to mess up, and who wants to spend time trying to figure out what's wrong with some CSS and HTML when you could be writing real code that you can write tests for and examine in a debugger.

So it was with great pleasure that I found this post by Jeff Atwood in my rss reader on the way home. The presentation linked to in the post is brilliant. I am going to suggest this to anyone I see doing table layout from now on. I have 0 design skills and I totally get this.