Listen to Karlos. There are so many benefits from keeping the content separated from the layout/graphical design, you do that in CSS. Tables are not evil per se, they are great at what they are meant for — presenting a set of data in the shape of a table with columns and rows. But using tables for layout and graphical design in a web page is as kosher as using rolled up tin-foil as electric cabling when building a new house, or using glued together straws from McDonalds as your plumbing. Even if it might work, you simply don't do that, even the thought is insane, and has been so for a *veeery* long time now...
Got to admit that doing effective design with CSS has a higher learning curve than just plain old HTML. It's pretty often that people just getting their feet wet have no idea where to start and when they try to layout elements they wind up with wildly bizarre stuff on the screen. DIVs in weird places, overlapping, bizarre flow problems, etc. Bad CSS layouts have a tendency to work right on one class of browsers and look screwed up on others. Folks run into these frustrations early on and often simply dismiss it all as overly complicated. Then they go back to spending tens of hours creating unmaintainable, rats nest table based abominations that look like something from the late 90's.
Same thing on the Javascript side of the fence. They have no idea where to start so they plod on slogging through tutorials, which are usually written by idiots and morons, trying to do animations, UI stuff and Javascript from scratch, and it never works right. They then conclude that JS is an abomination, unnecessarily complex and go back to either straight up static design, or trying to crank out rats nests of table crap with 5,000 line PHP cluster fscks.
They don't know how to do REST stuff with JSON, make use of JQuery, or start off with one of the 20 billion CSS templates laying around.
