Now tables are an area of much debate when it comes to web design. The sticking point is, technically tables should only be used for presenting tabular data, however they also prove very convienient for actually making pages look nice.
The official specifications for HTML say that tables shouldn't really be used to control the position and layout of a webpage, there are many other methods of presenting your work and that is how you should do. However not so long ago there wasn't actually many ways to present data, people have used tables for this purpose for quite a while now and it's very difficult to make them change. The main problem is that tables just plain work, that makes them such an easy solution, the alternatives invariably involve considerably greater effort and even then they don't always work. This isn't so much a problem with HTML as it is with browsers, unfortunately browsers haven't always rendered webpages properly, this is strange since in all honesty that's the only real job a browser has, but that's the way things went. Luckily browsers are now starting to comply with the standards so it shouldn't be a problem, but it still is.
Unfortunately because not everyone is using a browser that works properly many sites still try to work for them. This site does, however the difference here is that this site it designed to degrade, if your browser doesn't support styles properly then you'll be reading a very plain page, probably black text on a white background, if your browser does support styles however you'll be greeted with all the joys of my tasteless colour scheme. Most sites don't want their pages to degrade however, in an attempt to make sure a website always looks as snazzy as possible many people object to the concept I use here. This is when they start using tables.
Now for a commercial site this is somewhat understandable, whilst I'm happy to have a nice plain website if you're selling things you probably want a bit of glitz and glamour. Fair enough. The easiest way to make your site look stylish to as many people as you can is to use tables, even the W3C who write these specifications actually use tables to present their website. However the big difference between them and most of the other sites using tables is that they still follow the specification, the W3C comment their tables in a suitable manner so that the site is still accessible to all.
That's pretty much the crux of my objection to tables, I don't think they should be used to layout, but if you are going to then at least do it properly. Tables should be well commented so that they remain usable to everyone. Of course I still think there are alternatives, even the much hated frame can be used to good effect, simply disable scrollbars and borders then make the height fixed to a length that won't hide anything. If you do that you'll need a noframe version for people whose browsers can't cope with frames, but these tend to be browsers that don't create wonderful tables either, at least with frames you can offer them an alternative, but I guess most people don't like the idea of the extra work, (even if it would be simple to just use the content frame as an included file).
The main objective with web design is that it degrades gracefully, in theory a page should work no matter what. That isn't always practical but it doesn't take much more effort to produce something that can manage that. I know there are parts of this site that certain people can't use, I apologise for that, but I also make an effort to ensure the rest of the site works well. I admit I'd prefer it if I could make things look a little more interesting for Netscape 4.* users, but to do that I make life more awkward for others, and to be honest why is anyone using 4.* anyway, I'm sorry folks but if you can run 4.* your computer can cope with 6.1 or Mozilla.