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Obviously, table-less semantic HTML and pure CSS layout are probably the key skills.
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I don't understand that sentence ...
Do you really mean that it is better to do what is a simple task using tables in a complicated manner just to avoid using tables ?-)
Table-o-phobia is just as hard a disease as making large-scale websites without serverside assistance ...
Of course the table-hells of the last decade isn't interesting, but a lot of tasks is really stupid to complete without using tables ...
Use the html-element which easyist completes the task, no matter which tagnames it uses !-)
-- and I don't understand what a 'pure css-layout' is; I never figured out how to create an html-page without html-elements to host the layout in the stylesheet ...