<p>I know that tables are for tabular data, but it's so tempting to use them for layout. I can handle DIV's to get a three column layout, but when you got 4 nested DIV's, it get tricky. </p>

<p>Is there a tutorial/reference out there to persuade me to use DIV's for layout?</p>

<p>I want to use DIV's, but I refuse to spend an hour to position my DIV/SPAN where I want it.</p>

<p>@GaryF: <a href="http://www.blueprintcss.org/" rel="noreferrer">Blueprint CSS</a> has to be the CSS's best kept secret.</p>

<p>Great tool - <a href="http://kematzy.com/blueprint-generator/" rel="noreferrer">Blueprint Grid CSS Generator</a>.</p>

This may be unhelpful but I somehow don't understand all these problems related to CSS. If a newspaper designer would try to embed a movie in the ad page, everybody would agree that he's a bit crazy. But still those same people pine after three-column layouts in HTML. HTML is just not apt to handle this kind of layout well at the moment. Furthermore, multi-column layouts are generally not really well-suited for reading on computer monitors. Aren't there enough viable alternatives?
And by the way, even tables don't offer a good way of implementing a fluent column layout so this is no reason at all to resort to such hacks. Assuming a halfway modern browser (i.e. > MSIE 6), tables don't offer any advantages over clean HTML + CSS that I know of.