(talks about a CSS/divs solution, but as it mentions there are differences between the two). In general if you're dealing with a design that involves centering something with a dynamic size vertically, or one which involves having the height or width of two dynamic elements add up to the width of a third adjacent element (ie. "rowspan" and "colspan" in table-speak), there's a decent possibility that using a table might just be the least-hacky way to implement something. Bearing in mind that hackiness is a bit subjective :)
Yeah certainly, thanks for the examples. I think the first item you mentioned, vertical centering of a single dynamic object actually can be handled better than tables currently (see some techniques here: http://html5hub.com/centering-all-the-directions/) but when you add more elements into the mix I can see how rowspan / colspan equivalents are not easily implemented without JS.
A main content area and a sidebar with each having different colors and both maintaining the same height such that they expand vertically with the content (without having to hard-code pixel values).
I saw a page showing how it could be achieved using only divs, but really, it was a complete rube goldberg machine, the sole purpose of which, seems to be to adhere to the religion of not using tables.
I get that table layouts have their own issues but I think its silly to be dogmatic about refusing to use them where it's clearly the best hammer to drive in that nail.
