[globular-toast]

Ah yes. I saw this happen in the mid-2000s during the backlash against tables. You see, some visionaries had realised that the table element in html was being abused to create layout. The tools to do layout were added to css instead and the advice was to stop using tables for layout. Simple enough. But during these times there are always people who don't get the original message, or don't understand it, and just start blindly following some derivative of the original advice. That advice was "use divs". So they did. They would look at an html source and if they saw "table" they would turn their nose up but if they saw "div" they would rejoice.

The irony is it was completely against the original intention which is to use html to give semantic meaning to elements. Tabular data doesn't just have a visual layout, it is rows and columns. Most people still don't understand this today although with things like markdown people are doing it even if they don't realise (unless they start embedding html/css, of course).