Interesting times to be a web developer, as HTML 5 and CSS 3 are both on the (somewhat distant) horizon. I’ve just written about the Advanced Layout module on CSS3.info, IBM developer works have a nice introduction to the new elements of HTML 5, and Wikipedia has a chart of current browser implementation.

In a few(?) years time, a basic two-column plus header and footer page layout could be as simple and logical as:

body {
layout: "aa"
        "bc"
        "dd"; }
header { position: a; }
nav { position: b; }
section { position: c; }
footer { position: d; }

What a difference that would make to legibility.