Sure, tables are not inherently evil. But like every other HTML element, they have their correct and incorrect uses. The reason you hear so much crap about them

Sure, tables are not inherently evil. But like every other HTML element, they have their correct and incorrect uses. The reason you hear so much crap about them is because of very widespread misuse. When used correctly (read: where you need to display tabulated data) tables are perfect. In some cases, they may even be warranted in layout design. However, this is not common. Using DIVs and CSS makes for much cleaner code where a table is not explicitly needed. Hacker News actually uses tables. Not sure why, but maybe there's a good reason.