My pages used to make heavy use of tables for layout and other HTML layout constructs. Although they validated as HTML 4.01 Transitional this was nevertheless ideologically unsatisfying.
The future lies in XHTML which is an instance of XML, which in turn is a form of SGML - the Standard Generalised Markup Language. A characteristic of XML is that it marks up only the semantic content of documents, leaving their presentation entirely to the user-agent, which may be a visual web-browser, an audio web-browser, a database, or some device not yet conceived of.
So, I've expended a certain effort in making most of my pages XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, more as a proof of concept than for any serious reason. It involves removing essentially all formatting from the documents themselves and instead placing it in the style-sheet. Note that "strict" compliance is much harder to achieve than "transitional" 8^). For an encore, although XHTML does not demand it, I've also removed most of the tables that were previously used only for layout.
Due to all the usual browser incompatibilities and partial implementations of CSS2 this job was challenging, but I think I now have a solution that works and validates. You can see how much work is done by the style-sheet by turning it off in your browser or by trying Netscape 4. (I've been a Netscape 4 user for many years, but, sadly, it is just not up to this kind of modern web development. I've made sure that the pages will display perfectly legibly, but you will miss out on the funky layout.)
For more details on all of this, see my Web Programming pages.
Enjoy! And let me know if you have any display or layout problems with the pages.