[notahacker]

I'm not sure many people refer to "layout tables", but a significant proportion of the online "grid systems" and "frameworks" are dedicated to essentially producing the same functionality as <CENTER><TABLE><TR><TD COLSPAN="2" VALIGN="centre"> etc. in a more verbose, less reliable manner, using HTML classes, CSS and the odd JS hack.

[Animats]

That's what gets me. The div/float/clear approach, which is one-dimensional, is a poor match to "modern grid layouts". Elaborate CSS gimmicks are needed to fake it. Here are four of them: http://www.sitepoint.com/easy-responsive-css-grid-layouts/ One just uses tables.

Now we have "grid" as a primitive in CSS. Inevitably, it needs a special case for some versions of Internet Explorer. There's "grid", and there's "-ms-grid". Here's the W3C spec.

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid/

It's a lot like tables, but it uses different terminology and has some extra bells and whistles, so that makes it OK.