I appreciate tableless design and I am an eager advocate of a semantic web, divs instead of tables, content that form the shape, all the bells and whistles and the better accessibility it brings.
Unfortunately, there are still problems with tableless design. For instance, there is this firefox bug about two divs nested in one. Firefox does not recognize the width of the first div when you nest two divs inside a container div. More important than that, Internet Explorer still cannot handle divs properly.
Of course there are always workarounds to those problems. You can create tableless cross-browser design via css hacks, conditional internet explorer html interpretations, etc.
However, when it comes to everyday designer with deadlines and less time for the learning-curve of tableless design and css hacking, design without tables can become a nightmare just because of cross-browser compatibility issues.
The optimum solution to this might be using tables less than before and creating a design where tables are just used for main positioning. This can eliminate the time and effort until each and every designer have her/his time to develop skills enough to cover tableless cross-browser compatible design, or until Internet Explorer dies, or until each and every browser agrees upon a certain CSS specification especially on positioning of elements.
Good news is tableless design is not necessary for a valid XHTML design and making use of semantic markup. More important than tableless design is the semantic markup and the use of proper (x)html elements when organizing the data, the content that the page should serve to visitors.
You can still make use of h1, h2, h… header tags, li, ol, ul, dd, dt, dl, etc., tags that tells search engine robots what your page is about and how it can be indexed properly.
Tableless design is still necessary and should be a standard when we talk about a more accessible web. Making use of tables for positioning is not a good practice, I am not here to tell you that there is no harm in using tables. I just want to tell you that you can still create valid (x)html and semantic markup and be more accessible than the past, until you learn about CSS hacks and a cross-browser compatible tableless design.
Don’t give up on accessibility, valid and semantic markup just because you are not ready to do tableless design. Try to take your time and make progress in this transitional period. This is why we call certain DTD (Document Type Declaration) as transitional.
