[olavk]

Regarding verbosity: In any real wold page, you would have some additional css properties, so the overhead with defining classes and referencing them in css would be there anyway. So the verbosity advantage of html tables is down to "tr" being shorter that "display: table-row". That is not really a serious objection.

Btw., if you don't want a seperate stylesheet, you can embed the css style information directly in the html:

    <div style="display: table; width: 100%"><div style="display: table-row;">
      <div style="display: table-cell; width: 200px;">Fixed left column.</div>
      <div style="display: table-cell;">Liquid center column.</div>
      <div class="display: table-cell; width: 200px;">Fixed right column.</div>
    </div></div>

This quickly becomes an unmaintainable mess but if you really want, you can do it.