Did you get the XHTML and CSS2 memo?
There's been a sea change in web design since 2004, but most people haven't even noticed. From personal blogs to major portals, web designers have been getting the memo, and putting in a huge amount of work to upgrade their HTML behind the scenes.
Netscape 1.1 introduce the TABLE tag, and web design hasn't been the same since. In the late nineties most of a web designer's time was sorting out how to slice beautiful photoshop designs from marketing into workable HTML tables. Tools of the trade included an intimate knowledge of borders and padding, top margin differences between browsers, and the omnipresent "single pixel gif trick".
Eventually, IE3 and Netscape 4 picked and chose bits of an upcoming Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) W3C proposal. The bits they chose in common freed designers from embedding colors and font faces in their HTML, while the other bits broke layouts horribly. Recent web design software such as Adobe GoLive CS and Dreamweaver MX gave a nod to CSS2, but largely as an unwieldy afterthought. Most designers persisted in thinking of CSS as a skinning language, suitable for changing colors, textures, and fonts, but not the overall look and feel; and tables lived on.
In the meantime, someone wrote the memo. Maybe it was Jeffrey Zeldman, reknowned for promoting CSS standards, who posted From Table Hacks to CSS Layouts: A Web Designer's Journey in February 2001.
One of the earliest converts can find is Drew McLellan. His Turning the Tables: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Web Standards is dated 3 June 2001. As Drew points out, "the longer we delay moving to these new technologies, the longer we have to put up with bad browsers and bad working methods."
Adventurous (and masochistic) designers everywhere began to circulate the idea, largely by agreeing "To Hell with Bad Browsers" and counting on IE5.5, Firefox, and Opera to make these standards based designs accessible to the rest of the world.
So who's gotten the memo? As of summer 2005, it's hard to predict without checking the source code. AT&T and Sprint got the memo, but not Verizon. MSN got the memo, but not Yahoo. Even within a company like Google, grounded on web standards evangelism, some divisions got the memo but not others.
The most powerful demonstration of why CSS2 design is a good thing can be found at:
Every page uses the same HTML, and changes only the style sheet. Yes, you read that right. As you browse from design to design, the HTML does not change. This is a godsend for the automated publishing world, and any company not moving to this approach has only themselves to blame for the loss of productivity and stagnation of design that results from comingling layout (marked up with tables) with content (marked up with semantic HTML).
If you're a web designer, check out http://www.quirksmode.org/ and if you work in a corporate environment, look at how the New York Public Library presents CSS at http://www.nypl.org/styleguide/.