Sorry to resurrect this thread but ran into something that I thought would be a very note worthy addition to the discussion.

Several years ago I worked on a project that was very graphic intensive in it's layout. In that project tables were used extensively, in fact by today's standards over used. This project was from the early days of tabless design and many hadn't gone to it yet.

So, with myself having a bit of free time, I decided to pull the project out of my archives and load it on my server, and for the exercise of it see if I could eliminate all the tables. Nothing like a trial by fire.

The site was made to look like a book with a window in the cover of the book (for content). The site had two custom borders, one inside the other. Each of the borders had a top, left, right, and bottom background repeating graphics and all 4 graphics were different. As well there is a different graphic for all the corners (so 8 border graphics and 8 corners graphics).

The top and bottom as well as the corners worked out fine, in divs. But when I tried using a div for the left and right borders the div's height was only as tall as the browser view area. Now for some pages that would have been fine but in others it would have been several hundred pixels too short.

The problem is the long standing issue of setting the div height to 100%.

So no mater what I could not get rid of the last 2 tables on the site. Neither of which contains any content and one is nested inside the other.

So while tabless design is grand idea it is not 100% achievable.