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The current situation is awful.

• Major tools, like Dreamweaver, generate broken HTML/XHTML.. Try creating a page in Dreamweaver in XHTML or Strict HTML 4.1. It won't validate in Dreamweaver's own validator, let alone the W3C validator. The number of valid web pages out there is quite low. I'm not talking about subtle errors. There are major sites on the web which lack even proper HTML/HEAD/BODY tags.
• The "div/float/clear" approach to layout was a terrible mistake. It's less powerful than tables, because it isn't a true 2D layout system. Absolute positioning made things even worse. And it got to be a religious issue. This dumb but heavily promoted article was largely responsible for the problem.
• CSS layout is incompatible with WYSIWYG tools The fundamental problem with CSS is that it's all about defining named things and then using them. That's a programmer's concept. It's antithetical to graphic design. Click and drag layout and CSS do not play well together. Attempts to bash the two together usually result in many CSS definitions with arbitrary names. Tables mapped well to WYSIWYG tools. CSS didn't. (Does anybody use Amaya? That was the W3C's attempt at a WYSIWYG editor for XHTML 1.0.)
• The Linux/open source community gave up on web design tools. There used to be Netscape Composer and Nvu, but they're dead.

Here's something you should read http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/

  -- dbg

"How about not using table layouts? If /. can do it why can't you?"
Sure you can use CSS postioning, as long as you aren't too picky how you want you're page to look like. Unfortunately, in the real world customers will ask you for tricky stuff.
And by the way, the CSS experts actually agree with me here:

http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/23snags.html

        does not allow you to open a link on a new page

Good, I decide if I want a new page, not you.

If used properly this feature is useful to the user, many cases where you want to keep the origonal page open. If you don't like it, then use a browser that allows to switch it off.
Besides that it's what my customers ask me to do... and they're the ones paying my salery (not w3.org)

Yes indeed, it is only after posting that I recalled that the first part of that presentation is about abolishing table layouts.

Rapidly, however, from page 8 for instance, it veers on to semantical structure, and the ubiquitous separation of presentation and content.

All very evident nowadays, of course...

People, go read this extremely sensible presentation instead of the bullcrap above, and show it to your bosses.

Table layouts vs CSS layouts has nothing to do with HTML vs XHTML. You can have table layouts with XHMTL and CSS layouts with HTML, and vice versa.

Typically conservative stance. It sickens me so much that I can't formulate a properly argumentative answer ; see sibling posts for that.

You will die a slow and painful death. Meanwhile, those of us looking to the future are well aware of the current limitations in XHTML support, but we will pursue our efforts, knowing full well that its day will come. And much sooner than morons such as you seem to think.

People, go read this extremely sensible presentation instead of the bullcrap above, and show it to your bosses.

Thank you.

P.S. to shon : it occurs to me as I see you five-digit Slashdot ID that you possibly posted that link quite objectively, without actually endorsing its preposterous libel. I sincerely hope that is the case.

Why don't webdesigners simply use standard compliant ways to make their websites?

Because, it's far more easier to write web pages for one OS, one browser and one version. Especially, if you have bells and whistles to put to the site. Dominance of IE has lead to a situation where WWW means Windows Wide Web: Even when web designers want to write standard html they are forced to check it against IE bugs. Usually this leads to poor structure, like using tables for layout. See why using tables for layout is stupid.

For example about problems html writers encounter, I dare you to find out how to write W3 standards compliant pages that work with IE and Mozilla and have a flash plugin without googling. It's not as easy as one could think.

Finally, testing is also easier when you have only one browser -- platform specific bugs are doubled with two browsers.

Except that they haven't fixed the slashdot rendering bug yet

To fix it in Firefox:

get a recent nightly build--I find them just as stable

just install the Slashfix extension.

BTW the bug only occured sometimes if your machine was fast and it was rendering /. too quickly--you could try reloading--it was a genuine bug as it occured intermittently, but the awful, hoggy, invalid slashcode HTML doesn't help (esp. their use of evil many-nested tables for layout--see the funny and informative Why tables for layout is stupid).

this very page (Slashdot) appears totally corrupted

get a recent nightly build--I find them just as stable

get the new minor stable version (1.0.1) which is coming out this month

just install the Slashfix extension.

BTW the bug only occured sometimes if your machine was fast and it was rendering /. too quickly--you could try reloading--it was a genuine bug as it occured intermittently, but the awful slashcode HTML doesn't help (esp. their use of evil many-nested tables for layout--see the funny and informative Why tables for layout is stupid).

Sage cannot reload my RSS feeds

I guess I'd somehow like Firefox to "emulate" MSIE when it comes to viewing some "incompatible" sites

There's always tech evangelism (or filing a tech-evang Bugzilla bug)

Konqueror could pretend to be another browser

It was fixed in 2004-05 on the trunk and is now in Firefox builds.

Obviously you are not familiar with current web design practices. Any designer worth his salt will use CSS to improve their pages, not just "Linux advocates". Your conspiratorial tone and ignorance of the industry is what I was "blithering" about. Look here to see what I am talking about:

One of the major advantages of going "standard" is simply the correctness of the XHTML/HTML you'll send to the browser; no missing tags, no misordered, no proprietary tags will do 80% of the job. The W3 validator is your friend.

Most of the trouble with "IE-enhanced" pages is the interpretation of errors by parsers. If I write:

[p][strong]foo[em]bar[/strong]baz[br]

In what tags is the 'baz'? depends on who reads it, mmh?

Except for NN4, unrecognized CSS tags will just go unnoticed for lower-version browsers, so that if your structure is OK, it should be usable for most browsers.

You might want to test with Mac's browsers (IE5 at least) to make sure your ECMAscript works; some core methods are missing.

And, should you need an incentive to go table-less, there is a great presentation that summarizes the advantages.

The css Zen garden is a great example if you want to show colleagues why separating presentation from content is a neat idea.