CSS in a River of News, part II 

This morning I posted a query about CSS that would make my River of News aggregator look beautiful. It was hard to communicate what I was looking for. So I've decided to take a new approach.

1. I'm going to use tables. This really is an application for tables. That was made clear in the discussion. If, when we're done, someone can show me how to do the same thing without tables, I'll change to do it that way.

2. I'm going to provide a style sheet in the app, but I'll make it very easy to have it use your own. That way people can tinker with the real live working app while it's running and share the results for others to see.

3. If anyone comes up with a really fantastic way of displaying the River of News with CSS, I will use their CSS, with full attribution and accolades, and release the result under the GPL, including the aggregator. Then we'll have a beautiful River of News aggregator that's available in open source.

I've started to work on this approach, and will post when I have something you can install.

http://scripting.com/misc/riverExample.html

Yes, the first and third columns are necessary. I haven't filled them in yet.

How to use CSS in a River of News aggregator? 

I'm re-doing the way the NewsRiver aggregator displays the most recent news. Up until now it has used tables. Now I want to use CSS.

I've uploaded the table-based version of the page so you can see what I'm starting with.

http://scripting.com/misc/riverExample.html

I'm looking for examples that do something similar, in CSS. All pointers are appreciated. Help me get this right and I'll publish the results, as an OPML Editor tool, open source.

Update: Thanks for all the ideas! Based on the discussion, I've got a new plan.