I had the pleasure of working on a website for the National American History museum’s exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education. The site uses semantic validating XHTML and is laid out using CSS. There were a few instances where I had to resort to tables for layout and inlined-styles abound, but for the most part I think the site strikes a good balance between forward-thinking and backwards-compatible.
It was a little challenging convincing my coworkers that using these newfangled techniques was worthwhile. Indeed, I spent a good deal of time figuring out new workarounds to the plethora of quirky browser bugs, but I’m still satisfied that the newer processes are a big improvement over the tables-and-single-pixel methods of the past.