Furthermore…
The difference is if you are maintaining a large project and have declared your aforementioned snippets in thousands of places, and some PHB decides layout changes are in order, the first requires thousands of changes the second one CSS file change.
But, as long as you are happy with your page, that’s all that matters to most.
Happiness is subjective.
which is true too, but in the past I have done that with tools that offer “search&replace” in multiple files. I tend to add comments to elements so that I can replace them easily. I know, I know, that’s not as nifty as with CSS, but still it works for me.
The first table isn’t so bad though, but those width tags should really be replaced with class tags (or id tags if they are unique elements on the page never to be repeated).
Basically, use style=“bunch;of;stuff;here;” instead of the deprecated properties of HTML elements, then when you are happy move them to a CSS file accordingly.
Also, know your doctypes. If you declare strict you can’t go write code that isn’t. Most validators don’t care about your style, they just care that you made a mistake.
Finally, being 100% is sometimes an exercise in futility. But, you should know why you are wrong and ignore the advice instead of declaring you are right without understanding what you are doing.
Good times.
[i]Differences Between HTML and XHTML
The “bgcolor”, “height”, “width”, and “nowrap” attributes of the td element were deprecated in HTML 4.01.
The “bgcolor”, “height”, “width”, and “nowrap” attributes of the td element are not supported in XHTML 1.0 Strict DTD.[/i]
I feel so lost with this… 
Thanks Conner… Already familiar with Nvu, so this looks like the same thing but better 
Still a hack though… 
XHTML is generally deprecated. People don’t recommend using it.
Which people?
The way I did it was to think of what I wanted to do, and look up methods to do it. I recommend basic html knowledge first, though. Knowing what a tag is helps quite a bit when you want to inspect other people’s codes to learn stuff. 
One way of trying to learn tags is downloading a trial version of Dreamweaver, put it in design/code view and just write stuff in the design space while inspecting what happens in the code space. Suddenly you understand how a link is done etc etc etc.
edit: had to try naughty words for a friend
I hereby declare the tag deprecated in HTML 5, the future is Renoise, because it makes everything phat!! 
I think is already deprecated
is the way Or of course
isn’t deprecated but apparently is.
Which just made me think “why not make up ‘d’ and use it instead of ‘div’?” haha… 
random note: “position:fixed;” makes scrolling very slow in Opera, I don’t know about other browser, but the impact is so crazy huge I consider it “deprecated until further notice”.
So, to wrap this up :
I finally managed to develop a valid strict-XHTML-page using the minimal-table-approach that conner mentioned which works in almost all browsers (even IE5.5, woo, only some linux-browsers I never actually heard of shift the content a few pixels to the right for some unknown reason). I am glad.
Content is not fully there yet, but the page works.
Looks wacky on Opera9.5beta/Linux (stuff shifted to the right), but berlinshirts looks perfect?
Erm … damn.
berlinshirts is not finished and will come next but both have the same layout … I need to compare the stylesheets they are using. Thanx for the hint.
edit:should work now. the width of the body was smaller than that of the “whole-page-container” in the css.
The fundamental thinking bihind (X)HTML and CSS in combination is that you shall separate content from presentation, the advantages of this is many, the content can be read without presentation by devices and systems that do not care about the presentation or that can simply not handle advanced presentation, for example some mobile devices etc. Another advantage is that you can change presentation for the same content, or use the same presentation for other content. All this of course makes your html-page much more flexible and future proof. The reason why you shall avoid to use tables for layout is of course because tables are meant for tabular data, not for layout, and when you build a html-document you shall of course strive for a so semantically correct document as possible, by doing this you can make you page possible to be read by not just normal humans, but also by machines, but not to forget, also by blind people that do not care about your fanzy layout, but just the content. Also search engines of course much more easily handle semantically correct pages and is ofcourse also another reason why…
Because internet is evolving. Today many people surf not just from their home computers, but also from their mobile phones, pda:s, screen readers etc.
The correct doctype if you do not know how to do correct (X)HTML is no doctype at all, leave it out completely, then you will put the browser into quirks mode and can work in the “oldschool” way. By adding a doctype you telling the browser that “I know what I am doing, and I am doing it correct”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode
Transitional is for transitional sites, when you for example convert an old site with ugly (x)html to a site with new nice and standard compliant (x)html. Use strict doctype if you build new sites…
To be honest I do not really see why you work so hard to get the page validate with strict XHTML if you still uses tables as layout. Validating (x)html shall not be an end in itself, there is a real reason why you want your code to validate, but that just a small part of the whole, so if you just make your page validate just because it shall validate but not care about the underlying reasons, I think a page that do not validate can be as good as a page that do… and to be honest once more it would be very easy to make your page without any tables at all, the only things you have to improve your knowledge in is floating, margins and paddings and then you have a page completely without layout-tables… 
