Apart from the V&A Waterfront which I built the previous year with an HTML 4.01 DOCTYPE and which uses a single table for the site-wide, fixed 2-column layout (although the entire presentation layer is styled with CSS), the Teamscience site was my first step up in pushing ahead from HTML to XHTML and using only CSS for layout. Looking back at it now, the markup could be improved so that it degrades in older browsers better and embedded Flash tags updated so that the pages validate as strict XHTML 1.0 - but considering the number of sites that had switched over at that stage I'm still happy with the result.

Be sure to check out dezwozhere.com's list of CSS, Accessibility and Standards links for some great resources, while his blog is worth a read over too.

And a great site I've failed to mention in the past which has become the largest advocate for CSS-based layouts is the css Zen Garden - "A demonstration of what can be accomplished visually through CSS–based design". One in particular - Gemination - caught my eye: load it up in any standards-compliant web browser, and then load it up in Internet Explorer. As extreme as this example might be to showcase the real advantages of the technique, MOSe is really worth investigating.

Word of the week: chimerical

\ky-MER-ih-kuhl; Adj. Merely imaginary; produced by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; fantastic; improbable or unrealistic.

Strictly CSS layouts except for a few places where tables prove their flexibility over CSS, and it doesn't quite validate as Transitional HTML 4.01 or CSS2 yet, but it's the goal I'm working towards. Because standards rule.