I'm a great fan of zen, specially for CSS, but every editor has had autocomplete/expansion for years, and it ends up being nearly the same speed (t+tab, tr+tab, td+tab, cmd+alt+d x5) once you internalize it. I even ended up removing it from ST2 since it conflicts with default shortcuts. CSS is a whole different story, I haven't seen any editor with expansions as complete as Zen.
Table-based layouts is the only practical option for HTML emails, which is exactly what these guys were doing.
> writing an XSLT stylesheet to transform an in-memory representation of a customer's bill into an HTML version for display on our site.
If you decide to counter-preach, it helps to read the article and understand it first.
It has been argued here before that HTML is nothing more than "assembly" for the browser, and if it renders properly, why does it matter if the layout is done via nested tables or CSS?
The original problem with tables was using them together with spacers to create layout, not much other uses.
There's no inherent problem with tables, it is perfect for tabular layout. Data grids are tabular, most forms are tabular.
Tables are ok; table-based layouts are not. Anyway, I was just getting back at the author for mocking the gist of my current profession - upon seeing the headline I thought he was promoting the use of WYSIWYG tools or something.