[rabidgnat]

There are plenty of problems with CSS. You can't specify the width of an inline element, for one. That alone prevents a lot of reasonable layouts, like tables. Also problematic is a standards body that ignores this use case! In this case, they protect the writer from over-filling some boxes with more boxes. But that would at least be visible - in this case, the workarounds end up far worse.

[what]

If you want a table layout, why not just use a table? Or you can use display: inline-block if you want to give a width to an inline element.

[rabidgnat]

I run into plenty of situations where I have multiple lines, and I'd like the respective elements to align. It's not limited to tabular data, but it's the easiest example

[Daniel_Newby]

Tables FTW. It's the HTML element for controlling horizontal and vertical relationships at the same time.

[huhtenberg]

> You can't specify the width of an inline element, for one.

  display: inline-block;
  width: ...

?

[rabidgnat]

Unfortunately, bad browser support :/

http://www.quirksmode.org/css/display.html

[huhtenberg]

That was primarily in the context of "Also problematic is a standards body that ignores this use case!" part of your comment.

Besides if you don't care about antiquated browsers (eg IE6), the inline-block is a viable option. In IE it will require some massaging, but it can be made to work quite easily.