Forget IE6, unless you have an client that demands it. I've only ever seen that once and it was years ago.<p>&#62; java, css, xhtml, javascript<p>lol well that's the stack I've been working for 10 years so perhaps I am biased.<p>&#62;that it runs consistently on all the different browsers out there is a bigger task.<p>This is not much of an issue anymore. jQuery and GWT do well enough.<p>&#62;say you want to list the rows from your db: do you use a table?<p>Yes, you use a table. You're displaying tabular data. You should also be thinking about data models, not rows in a table.<p>&#62;then you need to write some CSS, cause there's no default look and feel provided out of the box<p>Lookup some templates and read w3schools to make it functional then get a designer involved. That problem doesn't go away using some other server language.