[zaphar]

who said tables aren't semantic? Tables say "Hey, I'm going to show you some things with a row column relationship now." Some times table is exactly the semantics you need. It shouldn't be your primary and only tool but if your showing a set of numbers collated and sorted by rows and columns then its pretty much semantically a perfect fit.

[shadowfiend]

I see this argument a lot. You're right, there are situations where tables are semantic. But unless otherwise stated, it's fair to assume that someone who's talking about semantic markup knows that semantic markup includes tables, but simply discourages them for 99% of layout purposes.