Everyone is urging you to make the switch from table-based layouts to tableless, CSS-positioned layouts. You've certainly been thinking about it, but CSS layouts seem so unintuitive. You've established a workflow with tables that, well, works. Why should you change? After all, browsers will always render tables, and you understand their methods and issues. All you have to do to get a design grid is fill out the Dreamweaver table dialog box. Would that it were so easy with CSS! Well, it can be—Dreamweaver includes CSS starter pages that provide a kind of CSS alternative to the table dialog box.

It is always best to start with what you know, and surprisingly, there are quite a few commonalities in the table and CSS approaches to layout. Tables and CSS layouts start with the same raw material. Consider the simple page shown in Figure 2, which could provide the basis for either a table-based or CSS-based layout.