I still generally code in tables, but I agree with this. The flexibility of design, and the design possibilities available to the guys in my office who use CSS, are far beyond what I can accomplish with a table or mixed table/CSS design, unless I seriously hack the shit out of my page, which makes the coders go bananas.
It's definitely a transition to go from the table mentality of basically stretching the page out like a weird balloon from the top left corner or top center of the page, to the CSS mentality of having to sort of "press in from the outside" to keep things from blowing up all over the page and each other, but the more I learn about how web stylesheets work, the more I respect them.
CSS fans often cite the fact that the code looks cleaner or that the data is more modular, etc. I don't really think that's the case, at least not when compared to a table driven site which also just has a lot of class and ID tags for background images, text colors, which in practice is just as flexible. CSS shines though where it allows you to create things in sizes and configurations just not possible in tables without a lot of shitting all over yourself (the biggest one being having two elements overlap, which is useful for drop down menus, confirmation boxes, etc, etc.)
It's definitely a transition to go from the table mentality of basically stretching the page out like a weird balloon from the top left corner or top center of the page, to the CSS mentality of having to sort of "press in from the outside" to keep things from blowing up all over the page and each other, but the more I learn about how web stylesheets work, the more I respect them.
CSS fans often cite the fact that the code looks cleaner or that the data is more modular, etc. I don't really think that's the case, at least not when compared to a table driven site which also just has a lot of class and ID tags for background images, text colors, which in practice is just as flexible. CSS shines though where it allows you to create things in sizes and configurations just not possible in tables without a lot of shitting all over yourself (the biggest one being having two elements overlap, which is useful for drop down menus, confirmation boxes, etc, etc.)