[shaki-dora]

One answer reveals itself by just switching two lines around:

> Why were tables declared evil? > Granted, we develop for a fixed screen width.

Personally, I was always more disturbed by the anti-semanticism of the layout use of tables. But I guess at some point the web developer community just really stopped caring about such issues. Or at least that's my takeaway of the common atrocity of style attributes on individual elements that css-in-js approaches frequently produce.

[jandrese]

I think the people really pushing for the Semantic Web kind of gave up. You hardly ever hear that term anymore.

I guess the value proposition of "You can add a whole bunch of complexity to your webpage that won't affect what people see so robots can scrape your page easier" didn't really resonate with developers. Also, the proposals I saw were much too granular and focused on people writing scientific papers on the web. It wasn't a good mesh for the "garbage" web, which is like 99% of everything.

[detaro]

"Semantic Web" and using the semantically correct tags for HTML aren't really the same thing.

[dmitriid]

There’s nothing non-semantic about inline styles. And most css-in-js convert thise inline styles to a separate stylesheet with classnames.

I’d say web developers care much mire about semantics now than they did ten years ago. At least now you can finally have meaningful conversations around accessibility and screen readers.

[ben509]

> But I guess at some point the web developer community just really stopped caring about such issues.

Any plan that depends on people caring won't survive contact with actual people.