css display differently for different browsers

[bobo]

It isn't. The problem is "browser wars." Microsoft, Apple, Mozilla, and other companies think that they have the best implementation of a browser. Since there is not set standard on how to read (X)HTML/CSS, only a set standard of those languages...they will not always render exactly the same across browsers.

This is good and bad really, on one side you have business competition wich is good for various reasons, you can't really have a dictator telling you how to design your product because that wouldn't be very democratic, would it? But, on the other side it would be nice to have all browser meet a standard and all be compliant, it would be easier on all of us who deal with markup language.

This issue though is not present in tables because tables always existed from the very first browser that was created, so with very little diference ALL browser are compliant to them because they were always part of the picture. The thing that I like the least about CSS-P is that the elements are not aware of one another, you can easily have content overlap one another because of compliancy. In tables this is not an issue, the cells will push away before content go on top of them.

Many companies and people call themselves professional designers. Yet very few of them actually are. When you design for a client espacially in e-commerce a real professional will design the IDENTITY of the firm inside the Web design and make it look good. This is easier said than done. At this level of design you cannot have content move a few pixels here and a few pixels there, and if it's your goal not to have your design move around, you better use tables... because of browser compliancy they are much more stable and reliable for consistancy.
OR... like peej said write all that extra CSS in another file to achieve what tables do for you automagically... OH! I almost forgot to mention... the table layout as far as positioning won't care if the visitor has javascript console turned on or off... that is the danger with dynamic css file include.