to further elaborate (and i can provide a proof of concept, if need be)
look @ postlist.tpl
we have 'width="xx%"' all over the place. well that is right next to a '< td class="yyyy" width="xx"' .
no reason why the css couldn't style the width on it's own and not have a width=xxx at all in the tpl.
caveat: when i say 'no reason', i'm really wrong there. i can see a concern you might have if a user (non css techie) goes in and totally destroys the widths. at least with .tpl's, the user has to be a wee bit more familiar with what they are doing.
if that class was also in a div, the css could then go further to re-style the css 'block', beholden to the client's browser / style choice.
with all that said, i full well appreciate your concerns of all the table, tr, td stuff throughout the code base and the pains in moving closer to more separation between content/style. it's not a small chore to do a COMPLETE job, while it's probably easy to do a 'first cut experiment'.
stats:
for .phps,
Search complete, found 'width=' 618 time(s). (126 file(s)).
for .tpls,
Search complete, found 'width=' 309 time(s). (54 file(s))
with the text editor being the big offender.
and there are other structural things too. height, colspacing, bla bla are all around too.
