Jason Clinton wrote:
Irrational, perhaps. But well motivated. I realize that the larger question that you, as the page author, are concerned with is 'who will be using my site?' For the most part, that undoubtably is going to be people browsing visually with a full screen computer. Arguably, since Ethereal doesn't run on PDA's or cell phones; it will be the only audience that matters. And that's fine.
What is it about tables that causes browsing in PDAs and cell phones to fail? Why would this cause more trouble for blind users?
For the most part, to accomplish the three collumn layout you described with a definitive aspect ratio, you merely use absolute positioning with doubly nested <div>'s to work around IE's problems. To accomplish a version that adjusts to the browser width is definetly more complicated but not unattainable. Again, the cost-benefit ratio has to be considered.
...but I don't want absolute positioning. Here's my abbreviated RFC:
1. The page MUST contain a header across the top. The header MUST fill the width of the page.
2. The page body MUST have three columns below the header.
3. When viewed in a typical browser window, the columns MUST expand to fill the width if the window accordingly.
4. When viewed in my unnaturally narrow window, the page MUST degrade gracefully. The content blocks MUST NOT overlap. They MUST retain their right-to-left layout.
To meet these requirements using CSS, I can spend an inordinate amount of time tweaking the layout, only to find that some combination of {Mozilla|Firefox|IE|Konqueror|Safari|Opera} doesn't work. Once I get it to work, I can watch it break when a new version of <browser /> comes out.
With tables, I get to lay out the page in 10 minutes and move on to something important.
Check out the source of http://www.mozilla.org/ for a moderate complexity example of CSS design with an absolute width.
Check out http://www.plone.org/. First, read the content. You'll find that they're all about the semantic web, standards compliance, and accessibility. Now, look at the source. They're using tables.