[kleiba]

That is because you picked an example where an old school HTML table shines and CSS looks complicated. But likewise there are many other things you can do with CSS that are pretty hard or impossible to do without it.

If webpages were always only made of box-like structures, CSS would have never made it. But you will admit that it offers a web designer much more flexibility.

That flexibility comes at a cost though, because some examples (like yours) that were very easy to realize with the very limited layout options pure HTML offered have now become more difficult. But that's because it provides a more general approach that takes care of many problems, not just three-column layout, and must thus be flexible. And flexible is what old timer HTML was not.

I'm not saying that CSS is the best or even a very good solution to the problem. I'm sure there are a lot of different approaches how to address the general problem of dividing content and layout. But it's there now, and it's bearable, I think.

Besides... all of what I wrote has nothing to do with the w3c :-)