To give an even older parallel, when HTML was created, it had formatting primitives that were just fine for the browsers that existed at the time. Then, as people wanted more from browsers, spacer gifs and other such aberrations were invented to allow us to achieve our complex ideals, until we invented CSS and things were simple again, for a time.

The point is, the web is an ever-changing medium. We create a language for easily expressing existing web designs, and then set our sights higher and bludgeon that design language into expressing new (and previously unachievable) designs—such as, say, multi-column text layout—until we create a new web design language and the process starts over. This isn't a problem with CSS; no matter what we create, it will never be enough. There's only so much you can do with ink on the boundaries of a page of paper; there'll never be a limit to new ways to lay out shapes and vectors in an infinitely scrollable, resizable, dynamic, animated and reactive space that can be variously interpreted by different clients.

That's not to say CSS isn't showing its age. It's just that this isn't shouldn't be considered a failing in the original design of CSS; rather, it should be seen as a sign of experience for web designers, that they now have newer, larger ideas that their smaller, brittler tools aren't up to expressing. Perhaps this is the best argument of all for separating content from presentation—if they're separate, we can replace CSS with something more robust (and then replace that with something even robust-er-er) without touching the content itself.

I spent a few hours reading old RFC's because of this whole thread.

It looks to me like rfc 1942 got popular, and the CSS folks never came to grips with that. CSS1 is pretty given the constraints of the day. I think about CSS in two terms (I don't think there's a standard for this, i just made them up) Formatting, setting fonts, colors and padding; and layout, i think old newspaper guys would call it paste up, where the big blocks go on the page.

CSS is great at formatting. It sucks at layout.

This was their approach to layout, http://www.w3.org/People/Bos/Stylesheets/model.html

Mosaic had support for tables five months before that, http://www.eskimo.com/~bloo/indexdot/history/mosaic.htm

They must have known, and i don't think they had a credible solution to layout problems. they weren't willing to make a full layout language, so tables won.

    <style>
	label { display: table-row; }
	span { display: table-cell; }
    </style>
    <label><span>Label:</span>
       <span><input type=text></span></label>
    <label><span>Longer label:</span>
       <span><input type=checkbox></span></label>

Designers have been trying to create grid-based layouts since the beginning of the graphical web. CSS was created after that, and its creators did not see fit to bestow on us the basic tools (flexible boxes) that could be used to create these layouts elegantly.

As a result HTML and CSS have always been coupled. Only by using both together, can engineers create the layouts designers want.

This most certainly is a failing of CSS. Sadly, it is also a failing of the web development community, who looked for progress from the one group of people who were completely incapable of delivering it.

I fint it strange that people keep blaming the shortcomings of IE6+7 on the CSS standard.

The working draft you refer to is a new model which is more powerful than either HTML tables or CSS2.

The question was whether CSS supports the primitives required to do grid layouts without coupling the CSS to HTML, effectively requiring the two of them to be treated as object code.

If you're going to require that the markup contain divs that are ordered and nested just so, so that they can be styled to layout like a table, then you might as well just use a table. Either way you are coupling presentation to semantics.

You don't have to use divs, you can use semantic elements (P, whatever) if that is appropriate for the content.

You definitely might not just as well use a table. The trouble with tables for layout is that they have the wrong semantics, which means they makes the page less accessible.

CSS3 has some proposals for grid based layouts that is much more powerful that CSS2/tables.