“…except when you’ve loaded so many CSS files that the initial load time is almost as bad as a table-based layout. But hey, yeah, at least there’s caching once you’ve gotten past the front door.”

This is often the result of poor coding. Since there is no drawback to the (with the exception of file bloat) to leaving old deprecated CSS code, it sometimes ends up in the mix.

Although, in my experience, two identical designs will have relatively the same amount of code. What I mean by that, is if the layout requires 12 css files, i can’t imagine the table based layout being as simple as a site requiring 1 css file.

“td’s are repetitive? Not with a tool like Dreamweaver. An extra table or column/row is just a click or two away.”
align, colspan, nbsp, spacer.gif, rowspan, height, width, valign. x number of cells
VS
doing that once, and applying classes using css.

“Imagine DW templates and CSS together? I agree. leave CSS for the text and object styling, leave table layouts to the page structure and the templates. I win.”

I did mention DW templates and CSS “Layout”

“Greater Flexibility”
But can you change them as easily? Changing the width on a fixed width of a cell is a pain. Moving layout object was a much bigger pain when i was using tables.

“More Professional”
employers, contractors, directors.

“P.S. that table I just made in Dreamweaver? It’s going to look/lay out EXACTLY THE SAME in almost every stinkin’ browser. Game. Set. Match.”
When I was in college, many MAC students were docked marks because their table based layouts went to crap in Internet Explorer, all they had to test was safari and firefox. The problems are not unique to one type of layout.

…except when you’ve loaded so many CSS files that the initial load time is almost as bad as a table-based layout. But hey, yeah, at least there’s caching once you’ve gotten past the front door.

“Less Code and Less Coding”

td’s are repetitive? Not with a tool like Dreamweaver. An extra table or column/row is just a click or two away.

“Do Site-Wide Changes In a Pinch”

Imagine DW templates and CSS together? I agree. leave CSS for the text and object styling, leave table layouts to the page structure and the templates. I win.

“Greater Flexibility”

I can do just about everything you mentioned, except visibility, with tables instead of CSS.

“More Professional”

I will say this once and once only: “the only people you impress with your CSS-only layout is other web devs.” CLIENTS DON’T CARE. MOST VISITORS DON’T CARE. Period.

“More Usable”

The one incontrovertible truth. Screen readers blow at reading tables correctly (unless it really is tabular data).

P.S. that table I just made in Dreamweaver? It’s going to look/lay out EXACTLY THE SAME in almost every stinkin’ browser. Game. Set. Match.

If you’re referring to a fluid layout, those aren’t something I recommend, but there’s no better solution then tables to lay that one out.

If you need columns of equal height regardless of which column has more content in it, putting a table in is still FAR simpler than the javascript solutions out there.