designing a news site: css or tables?

In designing a news-style site, where articles are constatly updated, is it best to use CSS or tables? For example,
http://www.theonion.com/
http://www.thestar.com/

Also, are the front pages updated manually or dynamically? Can someone shed some light/point to a tutorial that explains how this is all done?

many thanks

As fas as which way to go with the code, I say use whatever you're most comfortable with.

More than likely the way the backend works is there's a form or some other mechanism (file upload, etc) for putting "stories" in a database. Besides the story itself there's likely to be metadata like: author, category, keywords, date submitted, max retention period, etc.

Then, if the system is any good, there will be some sort of "review queue". It should be written in such a way that the submitter can't approve their own story.

Another component then would be the review process, where designated users would be able to view and approve pending stories. Once approved they'd be automatically picked up by the website for display (i.e. the query that populates the site would grab the 5 newest stories or whatever). Don't forget to have a link to more stories (where the 20 most recent can be seen, or all stories still within the retention period are available). You'll probably also want to have a search feature to go deeper into the archives (this is where that meta data gets real handy).

Thanks for your reply! Do most people do it from scratch, or do they use phpnuke ?

No idea. I did a little add on for a non-profit group that uses PHPNuke and I didn't really care for it. I've built several systems very similar to what I described and I did it from scratch (at least the first time... )