[strenholme]

The biggest thing missing in “display: table” is “colspan”, allowing a table cell to take up multiple columns of the table. That can be a big deal with some layouts. One workaround is to use “position: absolute” inside a CSS table cell to have an element which can span more than one table column.

[nness]

Why not use a <table>?

[strenholme]

For layout?? Burn the heretic! [1]

The real reason we don’t use tables for layout (and only for the occasional tabular data) is because a table layout doesn’t work really well on the screen of an iPhone or Android phone, especially when they are vertically aligned. So, the workaround is to use media selectors: Desktops, laptops, and tablets get a table layout; phones get a simpler one-column layout.

I believe grid and flex layouts allow one to use a single design which will appropriately scale from a phone screen to an ultrawide monitor, but I use a two-layout or three-layout design for my web pages.

[1] In the days when the CSS Zen Garden was new, all of the web design blogs and comments felt using <table> for anything at all was heresy, since abusing <table> resulted in really ugly and hard to maintain webpages during the dot-com days of the late 1990s. It would be an extended discussion whether it was OK to even use <table> for clearly tabular data.

[ath92]

I think the don't-use-tables argument is from way before mobile devices were something web developers cared about. I recall it as being mostly about semantics, i.e. tables should only be used for tabular data, not setting up the layout of your entire page.

[nescioquid]

That's right. The argument was separating document structure from layout. Using a table for page layout makes the document structure incoherent.

[goto11]

I have never seen anyone arguing <table> was not OK for tabular data.

I thought this was a myth on level of teenagers eating tide pods.

[strenholme]

Those kinds of discussions have dropped off of the Internet over the last decade and a half, being hosted at places like the now defunct original Digg website. It was an era when one could said something really stupid online and it would become mercifully forgotten.

What I have found is a 2014 blog posting where another web designer from that era says “the early anti-HTML table movement was strong. It managed to brainwash many generation of developers into thinking that any usage of table is evil. [...] I am one of those developers who avoided table layout, even for displaying tabular data.”

Reference: https://colintoh.com/blog/display-table-anti-hero

[cutler]

The Jeffrey Zeldman era of CSS.

[goto11]

These days you actually can use <table> without compromising accessibility, by adding aria-annotations. So if you prefer this to CSS, go ahead.

Most of the angst around <table> was before aria support, so using <table> purely for layout impacted accessibility, which meant it was not viable for most real-world scenarios.

That said, if you need stuff like colspans for a layout, you are probably better of using grid.