I don't think anyone is saying using tables at all is a bad thing, just using them inappropriately.

gmail is a table - columns are email properties, rows are documents.

HN is a list.

I believe PG argues a list is a smaller, single column version of table, and that nobody should care about the output of a compiler anyway.

I'd argue that the HN header is a cell, so are the links at the bottom of the page, and this is clearly a case of tables for layout. Also there may be things that parse the page for different audiences, who expect lists to be used for lists and tables to be used for multi columned data. Also, it's not hard to fix.

Reading the previous discussion, things got quite nasty last time, so I won't fan the flames and say anything more.

Here we go again. A preemptive note on semantic HTML: This is not a question of DIVs vs TABLEs. Those who litter DIVs everywhere are just as misguided. The idea of HTML is to meaningfully represent the content it's describing. Sometimes this means using tables (for tablular data), other times it involves wrapping elements in a div container.

Now whether or not HN's front page is tabular data (my vote is not) is left to debate.

Well, it's not only tables: if you take a look at the html you will see also the center tag, deprecated attributes like align and valign, inline styling etc. Hacker News is very far from what is nowadays used for building (by hand or automatically) web pages. Yet, it works, so this might be the final answer.

I don't think anyone is saying using tables at all is a bad thing, just using them inappropriately.

gmail is a table - columns are email properties, rows are documents.

HN is a list.