Gerald Combs wrote:
In short, I think modern web designers have an irrational phobia of tables.
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.
Some pages (like the LUG's), however, have a general information conveyance purpose -- again, for the most part, the primary audience will be the above mentioned PC browsers. However, if a little extra effort could be thrown in to allow the page to /gracefully/ degrade to render with sematic meaning on a PDA, cell phone, braile reading, screen reader, and spiders then there's a possibility that the time investment is worth it; personally, I have become so familiar with CSS that I just always do it -- I try to make no assumptions about the viewing audience.
With regard to your troubles with CSS, perhaps I could offer some assistance. You are right in your assessment of the myriad of CSS 'solutions' that exist. Though, it's not a fundamental design flaw in semantic design -- those myriad of options have been motivated by a fundamental design flaw in IE's box model and IE's 'interpretation' of the standard.
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.
Check out the source of http://www.mozilla.org/ for a moderate complexity example of CSS design with an absolute width.