So close and yet so far

During my daily browsing of various design showcase sites the other day, I came across the This is Cable site, linked to from Design Shack. The site looks very nice indeed - certainly worthy of appearing on a design showcase or two - and it looks like the developers had a general idea that they should be moving towards using divs instead of tables for layout, but they just didn't quite get there. It's perhaps a bit harsh to pick on this one site when there are plenty of others out there that are equally, if not more, guilty of sticking to the 'bad old ways', but this is an apparently brand new site that looks great but just ain't very accessible. A quick look at the code shows that the nice touch of the slide-out contents menu has been done by placing the two sections (menu, content) of the site into a table and then shifting the position of the whole table about when hiding/showing the menu. Why? This could have been done so much easier (and more semantically) by using a couple of divs, with one floated to a side. By using divs, they could also have had the contents menu below the main content in the HTML, providing screen-reader users with a much easier time of getting at the meat of the site on each page. Aside from the upsetting (to me at least, obviously not necessarily to the general visitor) use of tables, there's a huge block of inline JavaScript at the top of the page. Would it have been so hard to pull that off into a separate file and save time on page loads, readability and aid SEO? Probably the main reason this site got to me so much is that the various CSS galleries (I'm aware Design Shack isn't one) have done such a good job of showcasing great design that also validates and is accessible, I'm left incredulous that there are still designers out there capable of producing such visually impressive sites yet haven't apparently taken the time to make sure as many people as possible can get at them. Not to mention the trouble they're likely to have when/if it comes to re-designing the This is Cable site. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, my re-design of this site was done almost entirely through editing the one CSS file. This is Cable will do well to come up with a new design that doesn't require changing the HTML on any of the pages, thanks largely to the container table that's been used.