[JimDabell]

> Like so many things, it only seems awful in retrospect.

No, it seemed awful at the time as well. Table layouts were already long obsolete by the time Hacker News was launched. Here’s a discussion from over a decade ago on the subject:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2019950

Quotes:

> If this were anyone other than pg, you'd all be excoriating the developer for living in the 90s.

> The big benefit is to accessibility through screenreaders or other alternate clients.

> Look, do what you want. You want to write bullshit markup, be my guest. But there isn't a single web dev in this community who would code output like this for their own site. They're just too chickenshit to tell you.

And here we are, a decade later: nothing has changed, we’re still having the same discussion about the same flaws, and it’s still causing problems for people with disabilities. It doesn’t “only seem awful in retrospect” – it has been awful all along and people have been pointing it out for over a decade.