If I get what I ask for, I will never use another table for layout purposes ever. I swear on your grave (this is to align the incentives properly). I want a CSS 3-column layout that does all of the following:

1. Puts the content div first.
2. Allows the content div to expand.
3. Is fluid (i.e., if the browser window expands, so does the width of the page).
4. Allows me to fix the width of the outside columns.
5. Has a header and footer that expand the width of the content plus two columns.
6. There must be no space among the columns or between the columns and the header or footer.
7. I must be able to specify different background colors for the header, the footer, and each of the three columns.
8. It must not rely on images to make the effect occur (bandwidth, people–plus I need to be able to edit this sucker without Photoshop).
9. It must be pixel-perfect on IE 5.5+, Safari 1.0+, and Mozilla 1.0+ (and associated browsers using that version of Gecko).
10. It must be legible in IE 5.x for Mac.
11. The content of each column must align to the top at least.
12. The column background colors must extend to the bottom of the page.
13. Oh, and one more thing: it must not matter which column is longest.

That’s it. That is trivial to do with a single table (styled, of course, with CSS), but I’ve been searching several resources and I can’t find one that does all of that. Remember, the solution must hit each and every one of those points or I just can’t replicate the designs I get in Photoshop, and asking me to get the designer to change or the project manager to understand or the client to accept limitations does no good–trust me, I’ve tried.

I don’t even require that I be able to vertically center or bottom-align the content. Top-aligned is fine. It doesn’t have to work in Netscape 4.x. It doesn’t have to work in IE 5.0. I can give all that up in return for giving up the necessity of left-to-right ordering of tables plus their misleading semantics.