I read an article recently over at A List Apart, one of (too) many sites who's feed is currently in my opml file. The article described a way of creating a two-column layout where each column is of equal height, without resorting to the use of a table:

"A project I recently worked on required an elastic layout with two columns of equal height, each with a different background color. As usual, there was no way to tell which column would be taller. I immediately thought of Dan Cederholm's Faux Columns, but I needed an elastic layout. I also looked at the One True Layout, but this seemed buggy and required too much extra markup and too many hacks for my taste. I even thought about using JavaScript to make sure the columns were of equal height, but that just felt wrong. Out of desperation, I almost (gasp!) used a table."

Truly, have tables in html become so taboo to use that we will go out of our way to pretend they don't exist? Now don't get me wrong, I am all for the separation of content and form ideology, and I practice it as diligently as any other web developer out there - just not as ardently as some.

I balk at the idea of spending hours writing crazy hacks just to religiously keep my markup free of "evil" tables. Web design is the art of balance and trade-offs, and sometimes the price of using a table is worth paying. It seems to me however that a lot of people are willing do just about anything to to keep their markup table-free, and although I see where they are coming from, I don't share their fanaticism.