Bring Print to the Web?
A common tip, sometimes handed down as admonishment, to web designers was to never think of translating print to the web. The web, the advice went, is platformless, and a design is not guaranteed to be the same across them. Ignoring the advice, designers targetted specific browsers with pixel-perfect placement.
Now the age of separating content from design is here, where semantic structure is on equal footing with aesthetics. The International Herald Tribune's article layout system is a great inspiration towards creating a web that satisfies everyone. While it does use tables for layout, the article's semantic structure is nearly there. It requires client-side scripting for the familiar newspaper columnar article layout, but it would be possible to have a similar system degrade gracefully to the standard vertically-scrolling web layout.
The possibilities have been presented, and it's up to us to deliver them.