scissors and pills

Despite all my complaining, I am finding the whole Joomla/coding mess very interesting, if frustrating. I wanted to do a site redesign because, well, I just like to do a redesign every now and then, and I wanted to delve into content management systems a bit because they're fairly ubiquitous. Additionally, the Mr. and I will eventually get more serious about our tiny hosting company, so it would be nice if we had turnkey CMS packages ready to go for potential clients, which means that we have to make them, which means I have to make them because the Mr. has other things to do. Like work.

If for no other reason than marketing, I am having to think more seriously about CSS. I understand and appreciate the flexibility inherent in a CSS-based site, but I am also well aware of the limitations - browser incompatibilities, in particular. I have found several wonderful tutorial sites that will show me how to do incredibly complex things with CSS, but I can't help noticing that a large percentage of these tasks could be achieved fairly easily with hard-coded HTML and...TABLES. I love tables, and the bookendy logic that nested tables require is just my kind of thing (picky and precise, yet cluttered at the same time). However, instead of doing what makes sense to me, i.e., tables and hard-coding, I have decided to start from scratch to re-make my new site template (I used code from a free template as my example for the current version) so that I can perhaps learn something practical instead of theoretical about the superiority (or so one would be led to believe) of CSS coding.

Regardless of my intent to use CSS for the site, I am still unconvinced that CSS is inherently superior. I am not a real web designer or graphic designer or anything designer, and I have never been to any seminars about CSS, taken any classes about CSS, or read anything about CSS that wasn't either a tutorial or air-puffed propaganda. From my non-pro perspective, CSS is clearly a design ideal, and a very seductive one, at that, but it seems debatable whether it actually represents a functional improvement over well-considered hard coding. What I like about hard coding is that I can depend upon it: it looks like it's supposed to in every browser without work-arounds, and is thus quick and easy. Since I know my understanding of the subject is limited, I would appreciate it if anyone knows of a link to a good explanation of WHY CSS is superior to hard-coded HTML from a end-user/viewer/functional standpoint.

This is cross-posted to velvetglove, so my apologies if you're seeing it twice.