I have finally succeeded in creating a table-less web design. Not here (yet), but for a site I manage at work. When I inherited this site along with my job three years ago, it was a disaster. It had been set up with FrontPage, using all sorts of proprietary FP stuff, but then edited in other programs to the point that all the FP stuff was broken anyway. I spent significant parts of the next year and a half repairing, cleaning up, and generally making sense of the site, including doing my best hammer the original FP theme into more-or-less standards-compliant code.

For a variety of reasons, including major problems with our hosting provider, the site went into extended hiatus last year and I only able to get it back online and give it some attention this spring. Since then, I've made a few forays into trying to go the tableless layout route, but with little success. My latest push started last week (with some very careful re-reading of Petr Stanicek's 3-column CSS layout code) and today, I think I finally have a page template that works in all modern browsers (checked Camino 0.8.3 and Safari 1.3 on my Mac, and IE 6, Firefox 1.0.4, and Opera 8 on one of our Windows boxes). Opera doesn't respect a contextual selector affecting my bullet lists, and I think I want to tweak some typographic settings, but this is something I can live with. It even degrades gracefully in Netscape 4.8. I am feeling well chuffed as they say.