I spy two birdees...like the one all the way on the right of the sample photo.

Not sure what the point this post is trying to get across...XHTML accepts tables as much as regular HTML, XHTML just puts a little more demand on writing the source code correctly. A lot of errors that show up in validation could be a missed ending tag, or the order of ending tags compared to the starting tags, or a missing quoation mark that doesn't make a noticable difference to the site. The w3schools.com helped me with learn XHTML really quickly. My page is XHTML valid and I use many tables and nested table.