What's optimal depends on your objective function. For Ron Garret, it appears that his objective function was "most intuitive." When smart people are on both

What's optimal depends on your objective function. For Ron Garret, it appears that his objective function was "most intuitive." When smart people are on both sides of an issue, I consider it undecided. I personally prefer using CSS for layout, not because it is more intuitive than tables, but because I prefer to remove the table-cruft from my html. I think it makes php and rhtml files easier to read. However, in the limited freelance work that I've done, I've run into more than one client that preferred I use tables because they couldn't or didn't want to maintain their layout with CSS. Anyway, that discussion is ancilliary to my point, which is that the benefits offered by the author aren't going to be convincing to someone who sees a 40-fold or so difference in time-to-production.