[cheesegrits]

Well the Big Deal people like to argue about is using HTML tables as a way of formatting the page structure, which is a Bad Thing. Doesn't mean it doesn't work, just that it's inflexible and hard to re-style. But It's always OK to use HTML tables for truly tabular data within a page.

So vB's standard templates are definitely "wrong" in that they use tables to lay out the page itself. But that's easy enough to change with a little but of hacking on the standard "shell" templates.

The grey area is whether things like lists of forums, or posts in a forum, are really "tabular data" (and hence fair game for an HTML table), or whether they are really part of the page layout (and hence should be CSS). And changing vB's multitude of table based displays is a major undertaking.

My personal opinion is that Jelsoft should be working hard towards offering a choice of table based or CSS based default styles as soon as possible. Once you understand just how powerful CSS is, it's really a no brainer. Having a totally CSS driven vB style would make style modification incredibly easy and powerful. It really is mind blowing what can be done with fairly simple stylesheet changes, with no template mods required.

Just my $0.02.

-- hugh