a slightly more complex equal height columns layout based on CSS table

it's all about support

Browsers with support for CSS table may render this construction as intended.

Less capable browsers may just render “something”.

headline for a center column that's divided into sub columns

If these containers were table cells, the cell with the most content would set the height of all cells. It works like that here too, but this is not a table.

In this layout the CSS properties/values: 'display: table', 'display: table-row' and 'display: table-cell', are used to make some of the elements appear as elements in a table. Excellent!

Too bad it doesn’t work in “you know which browser”. It does, however, work reasonably well in modern browsers like Mozilla, Opera, Safari, Firefox, OmniWeb, Camino, and Netscape.

Yes, I know this particular layout doesn't reflect many, if any, real world cases. However, that shouldn't come as a surprice when the lack of support in all versions of IE makes this part of CSS practically useless.

Note that: what IE/win doesn't support – IE/win doesn't support, and that's about it on the issue at this stage.

according to CSS2/2.1

What we put into this column will be vertically centered, in compliant browsers.