I haven't worked seriously with web application development for a number of years and recently decided to try my hand at it again.

On the whole, I like ASP.Net 2 and master pages. ASP.Net 2 is much more like the original ASP which allowed for rapid development of web applications. I'm not saying that ASP.Net wasn't an improvement over ASP, but they did move away from some of the core benefits of ASP (such as being able to view changes to code without recompiling).

However, in my recent exploration of web development I decided to try out tableless layout, basically using divs and CSS to create a layout instead of using tables (Why avoiding tables (for layout) is important). After playing with it for a few hours, It seems that CSS (and CSS compliance) still has a way to go before this becomes as robust as tables are. It's difficult, and sometimes impossible, to get divs to work the way I want (often things that were trivial using tables).

[Table Senryū...]

Tables are so lovely

so easy to design

now they are no more

Now you know why I'm a programmer instead of a poet :).