Speaking of transparency, now that I think of it, someone just gave me this link:
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/css/edg...iral/demo.html
It's a really creative way to do this, but once you read the page you can see why it will only work in IE.
Between using
display: inline; for a containing div
float: left and float:right; for internal divs
and <ul>s for a div with menu-like content, see
http://dwight.tendirect.com for an example (not my site),
Divs can be used very flexibly and no different from tables.
I've found that these things appear very differently on different browsers, so make sure you test your page on more than one browser, on both Mac and PC.