<p>It seems like every time I try to create a pure CSS layout it takes me much longer than if I'd use a table or two. Getting three columns to be equal lengths with different amounts of data seems to require particular fancy hacks, especially when dealing with cross-browser issues.</p>

<p>My Question:</p>

<p>Who are these few tables going to hurt? </p>

<p>Tables seem to work particularly well on tabular data &mdash; why are they so reviled in this day and age?</p>

<p>Google.com has a table in its source code, so do many other sites (<em>stackoverflow.com does not by the way</em>).</p>

I'm of the thought that CSS layout with as few tables as possible is cleaner and better, but I agree that sometimes you just gotta use a table.
Business-wise, it's generally "what's going to get it done the fastest and most reliable way." In my experience, using a few tables generally falls into that category.
I have found that a very effective way to mitigate cross-browser differences in CSS rendering is to use the "strict" doctype at the top of your page:
```
```
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
```
```
Also, for the dreaded IE6 CSS issues, you can use this hack:
```
```
.someClass {
    background-color:black; /*this is for most browsers*/
    _background-color:white; /*this is for IE6 only - all others will ignore it*/
}
```
```