>> Facepalm moment: Using CSS, you can render any element AS A TABLE! >_<
>
> Well yeah that was going to be my first response, but you wanted the
> columns offset within rows and that would have ended up just as messy as
> absolute positioning.

Well, I can make it so that a <ul> who's <li> elements contain multiple 
<span> tags gets rendered as a regular table. What I *cannot* do is make 
nested <ul> elements render correctly. Not for love nor money.

I can, however, take a <table> and annotate each <tr> with a style class 
indicating how far to indent it, and get a result that looks exactly 
like what I want.

So I have a choice here: The information I want to present is 
semantically tabular *and* hierarchical. I can mark it up as <ul> (which 
lets be expose the hierarchy but hides the tabular nature in <span> 
tags), or I can mark it up as <table> (which exposes the tabular 
structure but hides the hierarchy in style class declarations).

I think I'm going to go with <table>, simply because it lets me actually 
achieve the rendering result I want. Sure, tables are evil. OTOH, my 
data actually *is* a table! So putting it in <table> isn't that much of 
a hack.

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