It feels like they're doing "something right" by avoiding <table> at all costs, even if it means emulating the same behaviour that's already built into the browser with a set of CSS rules. This is blind faith, not reason... and oddly enough I've noticed this type of dogmatic thought far more in the web development community than in that of any other programming language. My own philosophy on writing webpages is to do the simplest thing that works and don't obsess over layout; the content is more important. I'll use tables when they make things easier, CSS when it makes things easier. But never do I give any consideration to "X is bad", "always use Y" etc. After all, your visitors probably couldn't care less whether you used tables or CSS.