The bandwidth savings of 5%, 10%, or 20% on a ONE THOUSAND (1000) page website makes a big difference.

Almost all 1000 page websites connect to a database anyway. Anything that "big" had better have something worth going to and that means data that's worth storing in a database.

First, CSS elitists don't even have the web traffic to come even near 5% of their very own ISP's monthly bandwidth allocation. And that's for their ISP's most basic and cheapest web hosting plan. (That's one of the reasons why these ISP's can host hundreds of websites on a single server.)

Second, if these CSS elitists did have enough web pages to justify the bandwidth savings, they would be connected to a database anyway to at least produce some of those 1000 pages, which means they are better off using tables for that tabular data.

Every single website I design is connected to a database. All are dynamic, with a full content-managed back-end. They don't 'come close to their monthly bandwidth allocation' because they are given more than they will need. That way, when they run a large-scale advertising venture, they know that their bandwidth will accommodate it.

As I have already discussed, using tables for content storage is irrelevant to the layout. It would be like saying the eggs you buy came from a chicken, so you should keep them in a chicken...

*THE REASON FOR CSS PURIST'S HOSTILITY

A lot of these CSS purists don't even have a data-driven site so they have no appreciation of what you can do with a database. Sites like, csszengarden.com have no database or data and definitely not e-commerce. Plus, their own personal website typically has a bunch of static pages anyway. They have no idea that after the 10 minute FLASH commercial, people ( or users) actually want to do something practical besides being entertained.

Sites like csszengarden.com are not connected to databases because they are proof-of-concept sites. What do they need to be connected to a database for? csszengarden.com, for example, serves to show how easily it is to build a seperate stylesheet and apply it simply by clicking a link and totally change the layout of the page. All they need to know is what each element is called, and they can do almost anything to it.