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As a rule, if you can design a site in divs, CSS, it's better than table based.

Why? Mostly because of code bloat and design changes. There are many more reasons, but the short of it is code bloat. Here is an example

To create a simple table based page with just the word hello floating in the middle of a screen, you might write code like this:

<table width="450" border="0" align="center" cellpadding="0">
<tr>
<td align="center">Hello</td>
</tr>
</table>

To do the same with a CSS DIV based design, you could do it like this:

<div id="sample">Hello</div>

You see how using CSS defined DIV tags can save a lot of code space?

So what? The search engines can still read the text.

True enough, but you've reduced the amount of code the search engines have to parse to find the relevant "body copy."

Note: Designing using CSS and DIVs is recommended, but may require longer development for cross browser testing.