[adventured]

The tables bashing was because of the common view that CSS and HTML, the styling and markup, should be separated. It wasn't due to tag bloat, which has remained common with HTML regardless (we still have a million div tags in the place of table/td/tr).

<table> is a rigid display value taking up an entire tag. So the argument is why not push that into the CSS eg in a div instead and get rid of an entire unnecessary tag. This is why display:table doesn't get the same kind of hate thrown at it that <table> does.

[digi_owl]

So in effect it was fashion mixed with politics disguised as a technical discussion...