My criticism goes towards the old school “tabular logic layout” and that is what the author claims to be back.

I don’t believe these new properties will ever be used to build a whole layout. They could eventually substitute some otherwise “complex css techniques” used to precisely position details in your layout… or not, since the problem there is that css is not uniformly supported by major browsers in the first place.

So, reading my comment again, please replace “tables” with “table-logic”.. as in:

“in order to use table-logic as a positioning mechanism you need to have your content ordered by the merge and span rules”

In short: using tables for positioning is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Tables and rows and cells are totally non-semantic markup. In order to use tables as a positioning mechanism you need to have your content ordered by the merge and span rules. Separation of content and presentation is not a trend and is not optional. It is a web-standard and it is now 12 years old! It allows you to style and reposition elements without messing around with markup… argh!!! I could go on forever…

So going back to tables just renders modern SEO techniques useless, destroys usability and accessibility and is a step into template management mayhem.

So “complex css techniques” is the problem!? Ignorance is… you should have learned something in the past 12 years, but apparently not enough.

I’m glad that “old skool web-designers” don’t teach “html” anymore, actually their still in good time to go back to school themselves.

/rant

the idea that a div has some of the main behaviors of a table is really nice and indeeds makes the some stuff easier to do. BUT do remember that we’re not done with IE6 and IE7 yet as they are both still a big part of the Internet traffic suppliers. therefor this way of using HTML and CSS will have to wait for at least a year or 2.

@all
personally… i’m used to the way that div’s with float:left behave (like wrapping of div’s and scaling options). i have not tested the new CSS display:table option yet so i do not know the actual similarities to it’s HTML counterpart. so i have not a complete view of how this will affect any of the new way of designing, but i do think this might be have some benefit’s over the “new” old way of doing things.

i do need to stress that IE6 and IE7 made an average of 48.6% (W3C statistics) last September. so changing you site now will displease a lot of people that try to visite your new and improved site. that is more then FireFox use that was to 42.6% last September.