lucy24 - 10:12 pm on Jan 15, 2013 (gmt 0)

easiest is to use conditional comments

Apparently MSIE 10 no longer recognizes conditional comments. I think someone posted a quote last year. Or, er, 2011. I am still waiting for a definitive report on whether this means they have now addressed all those "compliant user-agent" issues that formerly made the CC necessary.

they should only be used if they contain tabular content

I just said something similar in another thread -- w/r/t to the begged question in "tabular data" -- and got stomped on.

if made a word document and you would not make it a table there: do not make it a table in html either

I'll be ###. That's about as decent a definition of "tabular content" as I've yet found. Assuming for the sake of discussion that "word" means "any word processor" and we're not getting into another MS Quirks area ;)