I tend to agree with the sentiments posted here:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/css-rant.html [followups here and here].

I've wasted WAY too many aggregate hours trying to nudge DIVs into place using half-baked CSS semantics that work on all browsers without workarounds, where the simple use of a <TABLE> tag would have sufficed just fine. Even this blog's sidebar does not behave the way I wanted it to behave despite spending some time trying and failing to get it to behave according to my preferences because I chose CSS instead of <TABLE> and, frankly, CSS sucks for some things such as this. With <TABLE> I can say simply <TABLE WIDTH="100%"><TR><TD>..</TD><TD WIDTH="300"> and boom I have a perfect sidebar with fixed width and a fluid content body with ABSOLUTELY NO CSS TO HAVE TO MANGLE other than disabling the default HTML rendering behavior of borders and spacing.

Ron comments,

Another common thread is that "tables are for tabular data, not layout." Why? Just because they are called tables? Here's a news flash: HTML has no semantics beyond how it is rendered! (That's not quite true. Links have semantics beyond their renderings. And maybe label tags. But nothing else in HTML does.)

The only reservation I have in favor of DIVs instead of TABLEs is when it gets down to nesting. Deeply nested <TABLE>'s can get really, really ugly. I think this is where all the hatred of <TABLE>s comes from, which I agree with.

I've reached the conclusion that if I can use <DIV>'s effectively (and quickly) and the behavior is predictable, I'll use DIVs. But same with TABLEs. I have yet to hear a CSS purist describe a logical reason to use DIVs+CSS over TABLEs for overall page structure. It all seems to be cognative dissonance and personal bias.