so, over the weekend, everyone's favorite iconoclast jwz decided to take on the new trend towards standards-compliant sites. i disagree with him that designers fall into only one category these days:

"HTML must only be used for semantic markup, but that semantic markup must rigidly adhere to the pixel-accurate positioning in the spec, so that we can still design our web pages in Photoshop!"

i think something that he's missing is the fact that a lot of times designers do come up with their "paper-based print-layout design they learned in art school", but then hand them off to schlubs like me to bring these creations to life. the issues on my end look like this:

designers i work with only care about the finished product. period. as long as the screen they see on their mac look like what they did in photoshop, they're happy.
i might not be the only one working on a particular site. someone else has to come along and decipher my code at some point.
accessibility of the site, both to search engines and disabled visitors.

and here's why i like the "anal-retentive W3C" solution:

you can't beat css for making global changes which seem to be so common for designers. "oh, can you bump the headlines up a point size? can we decrease the font size on all these pages here?" in table-based layouts, <font> size at a page level does not carry over to inside <td> tags. if you want to do a global search-and-replace on potentially thousands of pages, be my guest.
nobody likes to read tag soup. i've had enough of slogging through someone else's (bad) markup trying to figure out which fucking table cell is pushing everything over like that. what's more, semantic markup gives meaning to the content. granted, you could bump up the font size and just use <b> for a headline, but using an <h1> tag actually means something. what's more, having semantically correct pages makes them index better on search engines, and helps them return more meaningful and useful results.
granted, giving lip service to accessibility is useful when explaining to clients why you want to shred all their current pages, but there are legal reasons to do so, as well. jwz's stance against css i find puzzling, especially since he's been such a proponent of function over form. if your browser supports css, you see a happy page design. if not, you see the content of the page, and if it was done in semantically correct html, it might even almost have the document hierarchy/structure that helps it make sense, even without all the fancy columns/pictures/fonts.