[oliwarner]

As a developer who somehow survived the times of frame, imagemap, and table-based layouts, I can promise you, they all had their own issues. Well before semantics, developers and designers needed CSS just to make things possible.

But you're focussing on people and healthy ones at that. Semantics matter a lot less there because you can style anything to look like anything else. But somebody with a screen reader literally needs semantics for accessibility. You set your page up as a table and their screen reader is going to iterate through it like a table.

And things like microformats are soft-semantics that allow your devices to explicitly know that "this thing here is an address", "that's a phone number you can click", and there's a whole bunch of formats for declaring embed data rather than making a service infer it from your actual content.

But if you just can't be bothered, do yourself and your users a favour. Use a framework (eg Bootstrap). It won't be perfect but it'll stop you using tables for layout and that's already a lot better. I can't believe it won't also look better.