In my humble opinion the best solution for layouts is CSS is the CSS Grid Layout Module[1]. Both powerful and easy to grasp. Sadly, it works only in IE (from version number 10, I believe)[2], but others[3][4][5] are getting there. And, of course, there's a polyfill[6].

1) http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-grid-layout/ - specification;

2) http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/graphics/hands-on-css3/han... - examples;

3) http://updates.html5rocks.com/2014/03/Get-on-the-CSS-Grid - Chrome/Opera/Blink;

4) https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=60731 - Safari/Webkit;

5) https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=616605 - Firefox;

6) https://github.com/codler/Grid-Layout-Polyfill - JS polyfill.