1) Longevity – When my code is dug up many years from now without it’s accompanying stylesheet it will retain it’s readability due to the fact markup was used in the fashion it was intended for. This does not cover merely the use of headers, but also the table element. This is for a variety of reasons

2) Cross-browser and device – If you stay within the realms of standards and semantically, that is structurally correct code, chances are that your site will be capable of showing in next generation browsers as easily as it will in current generation as well as last generation. And on top of that it’ll probably degrade easily to for instance a PDA or phone if needed and whatever else that you haven’t thought of which might appear sometime in the future. And I’ll even throw in a good example.

3) Accessibility – While probably not all that relevant for this particular site, there is no harm in making sure that handicapped people have as much of an advantage as I can give them when they happen to come by. Nested tables and cluttered HTML 4 font tags and what have you certainly don’t help much.

4) Extensibility – If using div’s only, the idea is that the entire design, including all elements can be changed around using only the CSS. As soon as I start taining my structure with div’s for layout and not for data for which a table is actually needed, that ability deminishes fast.

There is nothing wrong in terms of correct use of XHTML (or HTML for that matter) if you use a table for layout. But there are levels of greatness when it comes to code structure, and using tables is not a ‘good thing’.

Read more here and here and of course here.

I was just being curious – in a silly way – as to wheather you’d heard from I/O or not.

But then again, since it’s not plastered all over your site, I already know you haven’t… ;-)