I agree that it may be as customizable, but as I said, I can dramatically change the layout by editing a few lines of a stylesheet. Using your method would require a fairly elaberate re-arrangement of all of the markup, as everything is locked in seperate tables. So you would essencially have to write entirely new layouts and call the data in their via php using your method. With CSS you can write everything once, and just change a few lines of the stylesheet if you wish to change anything. As apposed to going in and re-arranging all of the markup into the correct tables and whatnot to accomplish the layout you are looking for.
I can be done, it's just less time consuming using CSS
. It is also much simper. I also feel that it scales a lot better, and the folks at wired.com seem to agree. <font>, < b >, < i >, etc... tags are depriciated. They are not even present in the XHTML 2.0 spec.