Sure, in theory, separating content from presentation is a good idea. In practice, using CSS for layout is confusing, error-prone, and brittle, and that's b

Sure, in theory, separating content from presentation is a good idea. In practice, using CSS for layout is confusing, error-prone, and brittle, and that's before you even take browser bugs and incompatibilities into account. In practice it is even greater idea. Sure you can go ahead and have all your layout in tables, then go ahead and create several different versions of your site just to take care of phones, tablets and like. Or you can employ css media queries. Sure, learning CSS (and, alas, browser quirks) takes time, but it pays off. And frankly it it much easier today than it was back when IE5 was still relevant. The other funny thing is that some native applications are using HTML and CSS for UI :)