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by monk_e_boy 3428 days ago
Exactly this. How are DIVs more semantic than TABLE? And who is reading the source? Your developers and a web spider. The web spider doesn't care (I wrote one and getting it to parse DIV content and TABLE content wasn't much effort)

As far as I am aware no spider is looking at the DIV and gathering semantic information from it. Sure, it may look at the TABLE and initially assume it has tabular data in it, but a tiny bit of logic fixes that.
3 comments
squeaky-clean 3427 days ago
> And who is reading the source? Your developers and a web spider.

Or blind people using a screenreader?

DIVs aren't entirely semantic, but table is semantically wrong for how it's being used. It'd be like if I asked you to "get me the pencil off that thingie" and pointed at a chair with a pencil on it. As opposed to "get me the pencil off that table" while pointing at the same chair with a pencil on it.

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recursive 3428 days ago
Which tiny bit of logic can distinguish between tabular and non-tabular tables?

DIVs are not actively anti-semantic. They are just a-semantic. So they're not particularly right, they're just not actively wrong.

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naasking 3427 days ago
Screen readers and spiders do look at tables as semantic content though. Tables are simply the wrong idea.

That said, CSS layout should have been based on tables/grids from the get go, ie. specify a set of blocks as rows and cells, with colspan and rowspan. It took way too long to get to this point.

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