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You seem to suggest that CSS is good enough to do what we would want, but necessary parts of it are unsupported on IE. However, the article describes a problem

You seem to suggest that CSS is good enough to do what we would want, but necessary parts of it are unsupported on IE. However, the article describes a problem (content order matters in the presentation) that is due to the rules of the CSS spec and has nothing to do with IE incompatibility.

olavk 18y ago
The CSS spec supports the same display model as HTML tables (using display:table|table-row|table-cell). So if tables work for you, CSS (when fully implemented) should work too. Regarding a display order independent of content order: Neither CSS 2.1 nor HTML-tables were designed to support this. Tables only support content-reordering using some ugly hacks with merged cells. CSS have much more powerfull suport - using absolute positioning you can place anything anywhere you want, regardless of document order. However this comes at the cost of flexibility. Some new CSS proposals suggest a layout model where visual placment of elements in a grid can be totally independant of document order. However, since IE have taken more than a decade to implement the relatively simple table display model from CSS, this will propably not become a reality for the foreseable future.