Wrestlevania

I was making the assumption that a developer may have limited control of what markup is being output by their CMS - if they were using one.

You can't always nail down every last character coming out of a framework, should you be using one, no matter how great it might be.

Anyway, as I said: it's not so much a problem using tables for form layouts. But I encourage you to look at pure CSS solutions for column layouts (such as 'One True Layout').

You obviously care about what you're producing, you should keep pursuing purer, more semantically rich (and appropriate!) markup.

If you want to discuss this one-on-one, you can get me via Twitter:

http://twitter.com/Wrestlevania

Look forward to hearing from you, Olav!

Using tables for form layout is a bit of a grey area--both in terms of "abuse" and suitability. In my view, if you put your labels in TH cells and then you corresponding form control(s) [see note 1] in adjacent TD cells - and make appropriate use of 'for' and 'id' attributes accordingly - this isn't such a problem.

However, using tables for general page/columns layout is ignorant. It also highlights fundamental weaknesses in your page designs to begin with; if you need to use tables to get around the "limitations" of your CMS, you should be educating your designer(s) as to what is and isn't possible.

In my experience, with considered design and type-setting - plus the "background to create appearance of columns" trick - there's nothing you can't achieve with semantically rich, minimalist markup.

I've been able to depend on the 'One True Layout' CSS columns framework since its inception and have yet to encounter a columnal page design it couldn't handle cross-browser.

[1] You need to be careful with things like groups of related form controls, however--such as radio buttons. These should always be displayed using a fieldset, along with an accompanying legend, which means tables aren't particularly suitable for semantically arranging this sort of complex interface. For things like simple login or user profiling forms though, I think tables are arguably an OK construct to use. But I never do, personally.