[liljoeyjordison]

Using CSS instead of tables, how come? I can't seem to find a point. IMO it seems to be a way of showing off to people because it's slightly harder... Different browsers seem to argue more over CSS. And when I asked this question before the only answer I could get was that after the page has downloaded, it takes a little less time to display...

[karlcore]

1 - It is the "right" way to do it. HTML is for structure, CSS is for presentation. If you're quality-conscious, it matters. Sure, I can open the door by kicking it, but isn't the doorknob there for a reason?
2 - Using CSS, a site can be redesigned very quickly. For a personal site, it means less of your precious time taken in converting all of your pages to the new design. For a company, it means less money spent converting to the new design. Redesigns are inevitable. Why not save yourself some pain in the future?
3 - Alternate presentation. Instead of designing a "text-only" version of a site for accessibility, and a WAP version for people on phones and PDAs, you can create alternate style sheets. Same exact content, different presentations. Check out the style switcher on my blog for an example of alternate presentation - http://blog.grayscalecms.com/
4 - Lighter pages mean increased usability. I once worked on one of the highest-traffic websites in the US Government. The original design was a tangled mess of tables and spacer images amounting to 173kb JUST for the template. I converted the site to CSS, retaining the visual appearance completely, and took document weight down to 56kb.

The argument that browser inconsistencies create difficulties with CSS presentation is bulls**t. Take a trip to http://csszengarden.com/ to see what I mean.

[Brandon@Cstone]

csszengarden is an amazingly brilliant site.

And I think "Sure, I can open the door by kicking it, but isn't the doorknob there for a reason?" is the best metaphor I've found thus far for CSS. CSS was the way of the future a couple years ago... now it's the way of the present. I'm amazed at the amount of non-css sites, the use of <font> tags, and the amount of nested tables I see in large websites! CSS is much easier in my opinion once you get used to it. The first couple sites are slightly harder, but then it gets a lot easier.

[Richard]

When I first started creating the site I'm working on now, I only knew a little bit about CSS. I gradually taught myself the basics and started using CSS for fonts that I wanted to use over and over again. After looking into it more, I couldn't realise how much easiar it would've been to; fix things, speed up loading, and change things, if I had created the entire site around a single CSS document!

CSS is cleaner, easiar to code in, saves on you repeating code over and over again, saves on load time, and is more flexible then HTML.

[snaip]

Originally Posted by Brandon@Cstone

And I think "Sure, I can open the door by kicking it, but isn't the doorknob there for a reason?" is the best metaphor I've found thus far for CSS.

LOL, I second that.