Where I work, we separate layout and content quite religiously because they're done by different people. A mess of table based HTML may make things easier for t

Where I work, we separate layout and content quite religiously because they're done by different people. A mess of table based HTML may make things easier for the layout guy, but it makes it more difficult for the content people to work with later on. For example, let's say the HTML guy makes a page where product data should go. What exactly that product data is, he does not know when he's making the page. It doesn't matter, he can just make the HTML and fill it up with some Lorum Ipsum text. Then when it's time to put the actual product data in, this will take ten minutes at most for the content people to do if the HTML is clean and minimalist, while it will take a few hours if it's nested tables or worse (Dreamweaver generated crap or somesuch). In the end, the cost of having someone do HTML properly, meaning using HTML for content only and dealing with presentation in CSS, which the content people will never see, offsets the costs of having developers wade through messy HTML every time they need to change something.