"I fail to understand how tables are more "semantic" than nested divs. Tables only have semantics within the context of some formalism that defines their semant

"I fail to understand how tables are more "semantic" than nested divs. Tables only have semantics within the context of some formalism that defines their semantic meaning." Tables are not more semantic than nested divs. But nested divs aren't very semantic, either. Tables are used for tabular data. Divs are used for dividing content. "I don't see how swaths of divs, some of them used for semantics (according to some metadata standard), some of them used for purely presentational purposes, improve anything." No one is proposing that you make every element a div. In the web standards community, we call this "divitis" and while better than table-based layouts, it still isn't semantic. "CSS people are completely anal about not using tables for layout whilst at the same time the whole notion of document structure is so utterly destroyed in any JavaScript heavy app." Don't lump these developers (who's code doesn't gracefully degrade for non-JavaScript users0 together with the rest of us. "These priorities make no sense to me. Laying out web pages with divs and CSS is a black art. It's fragile. It breaks in all kinds of nasty ways." Just because you don't understand how to make something work doesn't mean it's a "black art". Plenty of web developers are able to create semantically-meaningful documents styled (cross-browser) with CSS. CSS offers advantages, but you seem to only see (imaginary) disadvantages. "It reduces the productivity of UI development to pre 90s levels and leads ot entire pages done in Flash." I'm not even sure how to respond to this. It's ridiculous.