Hi Folks, Wanted to get your opinion. I've been lurking and contributing here for about a month or so now and have been very interested in the subject of tableless designs and using css instead.

It's something that I'm working on learning and think it's an excellent skill to know.

However, why is it so important to be tableless when sites such as
www.ebay.com
www.amazon.com
www.pamelaanderson.com
www.microsoft.com

have not changed their sites? They are all using tables.

Since seeing all of the above sites created with tables, I feel it is less important to use css? If making the sites W3C compliant is so important, why wouldn't the most popular sites on the web be following? Yes I know that tables are for tabulated data, but obviously no one told Microsoft that?

Looking forward to your opinions. After seeing so many major sites using tables, I'm thinking css is NOT as important as you all make it seem.

Now don't throw me to the wolves..... educate me!