Yeah... No, they're not.
Basically, there are people who only code with tables, preferably with border=1 and red text on brilliant green backgrounds.
Then you have the CSS zealots who will work for days on a single table because it refuses to align correctly when it's turned into a div.
And inbetween, you have the regular users who respect standards, but who don't give a damn about whether it's a table or a div and use what makes most sense.
Really, tables ARE standard. They're just frowned upon by many semantics activists who think a table should only be used on tabular data.
Recently, I pointed out to the team that with Curve, the "Report to a moderator" link could be in the middle of a post, and thus have an exposure that is probably not wanted, as opposed to Core where it sticks to the bottom of the message and thus remains quite discrete.
http://dev.simplemachines.org/mantis/view.php?id=3794This is where CSS reaches the end of its capabilities, I believe. I couldn't find a way to make it work (and I tried hard -- look at the comments).
The same thing happened to me when I wanted to add a left-floated div with a sidebar on my board. Guess what? The regular contents had a clear:both setting at some point, and the rest of the page showed below the sidebar. Woohoo. Couldn't get it to work. After 5 minutes I got rid of my div and replaced it with a table. Now, it worked straight out of the box. Weird, uh? No, not that weird-- tables do what they're asked to do. You can place a sidebar somewhere, tell it how it will align horizontally and vertical, and so on. Divs don't do that. Maybe they do (display: table-cell, maybe?), but I don't know how.
So, basically -- Curve is not "ready for prime time", as I like to say. It's a very nice improvement over the basic Core, and I have to say the team's desire to go all the way sematics can only force my admiration, but beyond that, it has to work. That's the bottom line. So, tables.
(Okay, seriously, this topic is going to be to be split into several topics at some point...)