Just thinking about a slightly different approach to the redesign without tables - Maybe it would be useful if I just take a look at the current markup, and convert that to vanilla markup, which can then be cut'n'pasted where they fit in the templates? Maybe chopping the design into the constituents first, so that I send you guys one <div> at a time, and we go through whether it's OK, before putting it to the test.
With this approach, we could get semantic, accessible markup which is ready for CSS styling right from the start.
Is this even a good idea? For an example, here's how I think the main menu could be formatted (added necessary stuff to show in a browser):
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd
"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en"> <head> <title>Test</title> </head> <body>
<div id="mainmenu"> <ul> <li><a href="" title="Front page">Home</a></li> <li><a href="" title="GNU Herds charter">Charter (draft)</a></li>
<li><a href="" title="GNU Herds timeline">Timeline</a></li> <li><a href="" title="For developers">Hackers' guide</a></li>
<li><a href="" title="GNU Herds FAQ"><abbr title="frequently asked questions">FAQ</abbr></a></li> <li>Resources <ul>
<li>Careers <ul> <li><a href="" title="Available free software job offers"><abbr title="free software">FS</abbr> job offers</a></li>
<li><a href="" title="Links to free software business network sites">FS business networks</a></li> </ul> </li>
</ul> </li> <li>Special Interest Groups <ul> <li><a href="" title="GNU Herds' voting mechanism">e-Voting</a></li>
</ul> </li> </ul> </div> </body></html>
Notes:
No more @target - It's only necessary when using frames.
No more s, not necessary anymore.
No need for different classes for menu levels; they are explicit in the markup.