now if the spec actually had a nice “MUST NOT use tables for layout”, A would be more than sufficient.
in the light of this, i’d say C (although i’d add “where possible” to that sentence, as some specs may not permit the separation of these different concerns). there may be possibly the need for a separate “techniques” document which goes into more specific details (if you’re using HTML 4, you shouldn’t use FONTs even though they’re in the spec, and only use tables for tabular data).

“Tables should not be used purely as a means to layout document content”

Maybe a mention of semantics would tighten things up a bit. We also want people to adhere to the spirit of the specs, not just the letter and the law - something I see too much of with the current WCAG.

Instead: C, and work on a formulation that isn’t outdated before it enters final stage. Any formulation will probably have to be pretty loose if it should keep up with technology, and future technology is as unknown as most of the current technology actually is.

Stepping back just to get a broader picture:
I’m often thinking that the current technology isn’t robust enough for the content — no matter how it is provided. What it will look like in the future is anybodys guess, as technology isn’t developed along the same lines as these guidelines, and rarely ever for the end-user.
Technology itself is often not functioning according to its own specifications–if there are any specifications, so where are we?

How one should be able to get even close to reality with these guidelines is beyond me. The entire future will have to fit in here, so it is time to start on a new set of guidelines before these are released.

Oh, well. Maybe something makes sense here.

The single most important thing you can do to increase the accessibility of your code is valid, simple, *semantically-meaningful* markup. That needs to be addressed

We are still using tables for layout because I have noticed that using CSS for layout currently may not be friendly to people with low-vision. I see way too many pages where text from one div overlaps text from another div, making both sets of text unreadable. Alternatively, text in one div may be hidden by text in another div.

These seems to happen with absolutely positioned items whenever a CSS-positioned page is visited with the visitor’s browser set to display text at a larger size than the page designer intended. Alternatively, this may happen if the visitor’s browser is set to a smaller window size than the designer intended (perhaps because that is the resolution the visitor needs to use to view content on a monitor of a particular size, or because they need to have multiple windows visible simultaneously on their desktop). Table layout prevents these kinds of problems; the tradeoff is that it may force horizontal scrolling on screens of certain sizes.

I am open to reading about and implementing CSS layout in place of tables if someone can point me to some model CSS layouts in which text overlap or obscuring does not occur, and which do not involve cross-browser hacks or multiple extra div’s.