What does table based HTML have to do with functional and web-accessible websites? Especially in the age of mobile which represents ~50% of traffic.
Lots of things.
- Screen readers expect HTML tables to be tables. If there aren't things like a caption the screen reader can inform the user of a problem.
- In a lot of cases the table won't inline in to a logical structure for reading out. A screen reader will read cells out from left to right, which interleaves content from one column with content from another when that isn't the intent. CSS layout will usually read better.
- Table-based layouts use a lot more code than CSS layouts, which is more to download and more to parse.
- In the case of that website in particular, there's a ton of inline styling which is more unnecessary data to download.
- Using tables for layout makes it much harder to develop truly responsive layouts for mobile; doing things like hiding download/battery intensive page elements is much harder (especially if those things span several cells). That site does have some media queries for controlling styles, but it could be doing more.
As the poster above hinted a lot of public offices have outdated hardware and software that is not a consideration for a lot of developers. Mobile represents ~50% of traffic among the public - not among the people who were selecting the developer using the "archaic" technology that they have in their offices.
