Should I teach CSS layout directly to new learners or should I first teach how to make layout with tables, then table-less layouts?

Question

Should I teach CSS layout directly to new learners or should I first teach how to make layout with tables, then div+CSS?

And what should I teach between HTML or XHTML? Both are same so should I start directly with XHTML 1.0 Strict?

Answer 1

You should teach them to use CSS for layout and tables for tabular data. They will figure out that they can (mis)use tables for layout all by themselves.