The issue is not actually the use of tables, it is the use of font faces, font sizes, colours and all sort of presentational markup in the html file. The tables as such will still be valid html. The intended use of the tables was for tabular data, not actually for page layout, but you can still use them for that purpose if you wish.
As I told you in my previous post, you can leave the tables in the html document, but it would be wise to remove the markup for the look of the table. An example could be something like this:
<table border="1" bordercolor="#cccccc" cellspacing="1" cellpadding="0" width="90%">
<tr>
<td><i><font face="verdana" size="1">content</font></i></td>
<td><i><font face="verdana" size="1">more content</font></i></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><i><font face="verdana" size="1">and a bit</font></i></td>
<td><i><font face="verdana" size="1">some more gibble</font></i></td>
</tr>
</table>
The above would be the 'oldfashioned' use of markup. You can reduce that to:
<table>
<tr>
<td>content</td>
<td>more content</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>and a bit</td>
<td>some more gibble</td>
</tr>
</table>
And place the markup that you took out in a stylesheet, like this:
/*global reset*/
* {margin: 0; padding: 0;}
body {
background: #000;
}
table {
width: 900px;
margin: 20px auto;
border: 2px solid #ccc;
background: #ffff00;
font-family: arial, verdana, sans-serif;
font-style: italic;
font-size: 12px;
}
td {
border: 1px solid #ccc;
padding: 5px;
}
To link from the html file to the css file you would need this line in the head section of the html file:
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">
You can link to the same style.css from all the files in one site and be certain that all the tables will look the same.