i still remember when tables were forced out of fashion by hordes of angry div believers! they became anathema and instantly made you a pariah. the arguments were very passionate but never made any sense to me: the preaching was separating structure from presentation, mostly to enable semantics, and then semantics became all swamped with presentation so you could get those damned divs aligned in a sensible way :-)

just don't use (or abuse) them for layout but tables still seem to me the most straightforward way to render, well, tabular content.