Tables have traditionally been used to lay out content on the page; however this was never their intended use. They’re really meant to be used for displaying tabular data (such as data from a spreadsheet, for example).
With the positioning capabilities of CSS, you can build HTML pages that just contain the page content, and use a separate style sheet to lay the content out. Although it has a steeper learning curve than tables-based layouts, CSS positioning is well worth learning as your resulting sites will be faster-loading, easier to maintain and more accessible.
CSS positioning can also do a lot of cool tricks that are very hard with tables, and you can also change the entire look of your site just by changing your style sheet (a great example of this is CSS Zen Garden).
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