It's sad really. Table-based layouts have been considered bad practice for years but CSS is only just now becoming a superset. That is if you're lucky enough to be free of old browsers. If you want everything to "just work" tables are still the practical choice to this day. Kudos to PG for sticking to what he learned in the 90's when he built HN.
Yes! It's sad that table-based layouts became "bad practice". Generally they're a lot simpler to understand than the mess of CSS and bizarrely named divs we have today.
An important reason that table based layouts became obsolete in HTML is because the way table cells are rendered is not the same as how `div`s are rendered. It's shockingly difficult to get a table cell to keep a consistent size. This makes some sense if you're using it as a simple data container, but doesn't work at all if you're trying to use it as a generic content container the way we use `div`s
Also, if by "bizarrely named divs" you mean things like "section", "article", "header", "footer", etc., I have to disagree; I think these are a huge improvement in terms of readability and allowing a developer to communicate the intended purpose and structure of the code, and they offer significant advantages in accessibility as well. You ask me, the semantic web is a wonderful thing
I think part of the reason tables became considered "bad" was that back at that time most web pages were built by interspersed HTML and ASP or PHP code and getting all the TR and TD tags balanced especially with rowspans or colspans thrown in quickly became a mess. Every page was a standalone thing also, it was much less common to see templating systems used to establish the overall structure of the site. So if you ever got the assignment to "reskin" a website, it was a huge amount of very tedious work making repeated similar changes to all the tables and other markup on every page.
Today we have much better ways to create an overall layout and separate markup from content. Using tables today would be a lot less of a problem than it was when they were decreed to be "bad."
From what I could tell, it is because HTML tables have a specific structural meaning, which is among other things used by screen readers. So if used properly, a person who needs a screen reader could reliably have the contents of a table read to them, but if it's used for layout the result is useless. There seems to be enough people conscious of this that use of tables for layout has always been frowned on. Now there are better hints for screen readers, ,but tables are still useful for screen readers "out of the box."
In any case, tables are not nearly as flexible as a true responsive layout.
Yeah a huge part of this too was, for whatever reason, old search engines not being able to index what was inside of tables. I imagine it's not even like that anymore.
