It is simple enough to add drop shadows in CSS - just use background images on your containing DIV.
There is no area where tables are better than CSS for layout. Tables were designed for tabular data and were incorrectly used as a design/layout aid - which in fairness made the web more interesting. I, like all web designers used tables when it was the defacto standard to layout web websites but with the advent of CSS and particularly CSS 2.0, tables have been resigned to their appropriate function - tabular data.
If you continue to use tables for layout, they will have accessibility issues for the visually impaired - screen-readers won't read accurately, search engines won't search properly - and this will of course affect your page rankings and in a modern web that should be accessible to all web devices - i.e. ****** phones, PDA's and the like, a tabled website would need significant alterations in order to display properly.
A semantically structured , standards compliant HTML file with external style sheet to handle ALL the styling elements is the best and most efficient way to design web pages. Limited use of DIVs too can make your website more efficient, bandwidth friendly and search engine friendly. All HTML tags can be styled with CSS and all blocklevel HTML elements should be styled without a containing DIV where possible. This will ensure a page that is accessible to all special user needs, and can be styled according to the device it's being displayed on - or printer it is sent to.
When styling a well structured HTML page the freedom for creativity far outweighs anything that was dreamt of in the days of using tables for layout - and the fact that a CSS file need only be called once for an entire website - unlike a tabled website where the tables need to be redrawn every time a page is loaded, makes it far more efficient.
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