[jonathan lall]

There's no such thing as "no longer supported by web standards," but the use of tables in a presentational context is deprecated by the community, and is of course misusing a medium for representing tabular data. Often tables are easier to use, but are of course only useful if you intend for your pages to only ever be readable by specific types of browsers on PCs. They destroy the idea of browsing the web from anything other than a PC, and incidentally are slow to render and even slower to load comparatively. That said, table-based layouts will still validate and render as you'd expect in mainstream browsers under typical doctypes. They'll just be perpetually a tad silly. If you're still interested, I'm fairly certain I could fix your problem without the use of tables if you post the source code.

As for div tags, max, they aren't much better. Overuse of divs and spans (which are theoretically for defining divisions not addressed by othe HTML elements) results in semantic nonsense and presentational HTML. The table will be in HTML for the forseeable future, but is simply meant for tabular data, and not as a structural device.