I've been going through the Scoop code for my site and making changes all over the place, replacing TABLE and FONT elements with DIV and SPAN elements wherever I can. I've been doing the same with the various blocks and boxes in Scoop.
There's a number of advantages here.
First, less work is done by the server. In current Scoop, all sorts of stylistic information (fonts, colors, etc.) are templated in as the page is generated. If these were replaced by class attributes in the appropriate elements, the server could eliminate a large number of replacements and let the client pick up the CSS file and do the styling itself. This does lose some flexibility (|norm_font|, for example, could be replaced with HTML or text that has nothing to do with a font style for whatever reason), but nothing serious.
Cleaner code. In many places, I've seen things like "|title_font||title|</b></font>" which obviously goes a bit strange if you change title_font drastically. SPANs and DIVs would help protect against these kinds of errors.
Table layouts are evil. All the nested tables introduce rendering overhead to the client and bloat the HTML.
Finally, it might be nice if the HTML generated by Scoop actually conformed to some recent HTML spec.
Anyways, I'm working on making these changes for my own site. If there's any interest in merging some of these changes, let me know.
