The reason you’re giving up and using tables is not because it is easier. It is because you don’t know CSS. Hmph.

Derek Featherstone

There is no ‘CSS vs. Tables’ debate. What’s going on is this: CSS evangelism happened. It went as far as it could in that form. It educated an entire generation of developers. It helped the profession of web development become truly professional. It opened peoples eyes to the power of a the web beyond visuals and propelled them to value accessibility, interoperability, semantics, microformats and much more that makes the web rich.

That CSS evangelism ceased. It’s ceased because everyone who’s going to get it, has got it; learned it; knows it. Other audiences need different kinds of education. That leaves a vacuum. A vacuum free of that passion, expertise and talent that drove initial CSS adoption. On the internet, vacuums get filled with noise. Noise from the cynics, also-rans and can’t-be-arseds of the web. People like 37signals, with a habit of ignoring well qualified advice in favour of link-bait posturing. People who are simply missing the skills they need to do this job, but who spy an opportunity to rebel against education, rather than seek out new knowledge. They preach that the world is flat, because they haven’t yet travelled around it.

There is no resurgence in ‘table based design’. All we’re hearing are the unsupressed wails of those those left behind, because everybody else moved on.