I just replied to www-style quickly explaining my plan, the same content as the previous post but-one really. I got one reply almost straight away:

Just FYI I completely agree with you. Other than inconsistency across browsers, tables are a great layout mechanism - easy to understand and very powerful. I think that the CSS designers saw the “misuse” of tables and threw the baby out with the bathwater. If you simply renamed the TABLE tag to LAYOUT, you’d have a simpler, more powerful, and more familiar tool than CSS layout and no semantic or accessibility issues.

This expresses something which I agree with but hadn’t put down in writing. Sometimes, grids (AKA tables) are a very simple and powerful tool that CSS doesn’t provide. The main problem with trying to do things the CSS way is that often the content needs to jostle with other areas to be laid out properly. It’s those relationships that absolute positioning can’t express, but tables do with ease.