One point I try to get across to people working on the web is that they should think of HTML as a render target, not as a layout tool. The point of HTML isn't

One point I try to get across to people working on the web is that they should think of HTML as a render target, not as a layout tool. The point of HTML isn't to make it easy to lay out a document, it's to have an easily understandable pure-text representation of hierarchical data that can be read by computers/users. Light, well-formatted, semantic HTML isn't an engineering concern, it's a UX concern. Of course HTML can be used as a layout tool, but that's not its primarily purpose, otherwise it would include decent 2-way data bindings for tables.