Theme development

I played around recently and learned how to write a .theme which is pure CSS, no tables.

It's installed here: http://healership.com/

The salient features as I see them are:

Do either of these Smarty-based theme engine work properly for Drupal currently?

Smarty Theme Engine:
http://drupal.org/project/smarty

wgSmarty:
http://drupal.org/node/26897

The Smarty Theme Engine page says it's "recently updated" but the page itself hasn't been updated since December 2, 2004 ...

How can I cut that obnoxious watchdog table in the administration section down to size?

There are more tables and forms with unnecessarily wide cells that don't scale...

I am setting up a site, and am modifying box_cleanslate (a phptemplate theme) to my own purposes in Drupal 4.6.3.

However, I'd like to put gutters (is that the right term?), i.e., columns on either side of the page so that the body of the page doesn't start or finish right at the edge of the browser window; I've seen some Drupal sites set up like this, but don't know enough about the structure to figure out where this would be done, and haven't managed to figure it out by trial and error.

My site is using Drupal 4.6, with the theme called Interlaced. Interlaced is just a CSS theme, not using the PHP Theme Engine. I am about to begin my first attemp at styling my own Theme for my Drupal site. I hope to not use Tables, but DIV’s with the CSS.

What elements, classes and IDs in CSS control positioning and width of the left-, center- and right column?

I'm building a basic theme with a page.tpl.php and a style.css that has these lines:

.leftcolumn {
position: absolute;
left: 3%;
width: 10%;
}

.centercolumn {
position: absolute;
left: 15%;
max-width : 30%;
}

.rightcolumn {
position: absolute;
right: 10%;
}