[jerf]

The "Tables are Harmful" club largely came from the crew who thinks HTML carries lots of semantics and that if you don't use the Blessed Tags that carry those semantics you're doing Bad Design.

The rational evidence in favor of this claim has always been weak. The "div" tag basically finished it off. The people who use HTML "semantically" have always been dwarfed by the people just making it look good on the screen, and the number of applications that use those semantics has always been small and on the fringe for something so putatively important.

However, the idea persists to this day despite its near complete failure to pay off significantly in nearly twenty years, and I'm sure someone will angrily reply to this and list the incredibly useful semantic HTML features that they and fifteen other people have found to be just incredible. Perhaps we'll also get the traditional citation of the Google info boxes, which have nothing to do with the semantic web and everything to do with Google throwing a crapton of machine learning and humans at the problem of parsing distinctly non-semantic HTML until they cracked the problem.

(An honorable mention to screen readers, which sorta do benefit, but still nowhere near as much as you might casually expect.)

Today the reason not to use tables is more just that it's inconvenient to do things like have a mobile and desktop layout. I believe they've got all the tools nowadays to tear into a table-based layout, break the tables apart, and treat it like any other CSS-styled content, but that's relatively recent, and still a silly way to operate when you could just use normal layout elements ("div" if nothing else) like a sane person and not have to undo the table layout before you can manipulate them properly.

[spread_love]

> honorable mention to screen readers

Too limited, and deserving of much more than an honorable mention.

Accessibility should be a fundamental consideration of any reasonably sized app, using <table>s to markup tables is part of that.

Assistive devices are not limited to screen readers, and it's just good practice to use tables for tables.

CSS Grid has landed in all major browsers, if you want a grid layout, use grids for layout.

[WillusFredus]

> the idea persists to this day despite its near complete failure to pay off significantly in nearly twenty years

I am not clear on exactly what "the idea" refers to, perhaps you could clarify. Also, how has the idea "completely failed"? And what would complete success look like?

[jerf]

The idea is the "semantic web". Success would look like almost everyone here having to know a lot more about the "semantic web" to do their jobs, such that I wouldn't have to explain to anyone what it was because it would just be how things worked, because it would be that important, and they couldn't operate without it because they wouldn't be able to compete against other websites without the staggering benefits that super-careful, expert semantic design brings them. Rather than just learning the layout and adding a few extra accessibility tags as needed.

As it stands now, it's very practical to just slap some <div>s down and do some CSS and be done.

[pwdisswordfish9]

Obnoxiously bad take.

> Google info boxes[...] have nothing to do with the semantic web and everything to do with Google throwing a crapton of machine learning and humans at the problem of parsing distinctly non-semantic HTML until they cracked the problem

This is verging on /r/SelfAwarewolves material.

[jerf]

I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting it. Google did not simply write a web scraper that pulls a <business_hours> or a <dc:business_hours> tag out of the web. They wrote a web scraper that super, super intelligently examines the HTML and looks for "anything that looks like business hours"; maybe it's in a table, maybe it's days of the week separated by &nbsp; and <br>, maybe it's in <div>s or <span>s with suggestive CSS class names, maybe it's just in a pile of other HTML. The exact promise of the Semantic Web was that we could just load up a page and get a <business_hours> out of it. Google had to extract the "semantics" with everything but the "semantic web", because the "semantic web" is a no-show. Throwing a crapton of machine learning and humans at extracting semantically useful information from a page is precisely what the Semantic Web isn't.

Which is why it is bizarrely unselfaware when Semantic Web advocates almost inevitably cite that as their biggest success. It isn't. It's their biggest failure.

[pwdisswordfish9]

> I'm pretty sure you're misinterpreting it

You should be more sure of the things you're pretty sure of before saying you're sure of them.

There was no misinterpretation—from this end, that is. Your comment wasn't particularly sophisticated. It didn't require explanation.

> Google did not simply write a web scraper that pulls a <business_hours> or a <dc:business_hours> tag out of the web. They wrote a web scraper that super, super intelligently examines the HTML and[...]

No shit. The value proposition of the semantic web follows from how the world would be much better off if that weren't necessary. It has always been the case that, without the "semantic" half of "semantic web", attaining Google-level mastery over the Web's messy inputs is really, really difficult and requires Google-level resources. This isn't news. Yet you presented it as if it were in insightful observation wrapped in sage wisdom.

In your attempt to "prove" by counterexample what's Wrong with the semantic web, you just end up undergirding its very premise.

> Which is why it is bizarrely unselfaware when Semantic Web advocates almost inevitably cite that as their biggest success.

You cited them. You are literally the only person who mentioned them here, at all. You brought them up.

Saddling someone who advocates for X with the burden of defending position Y that you yourself have pulled from thin air is a textbook example of a bad argument. If you defeat some easily take-downable opponent (a 6-year-old, let's say—and one who is made of straw, for good measure) and then plan to enter the ring in subsequent matches having only bothered yourself with the thought that you will face the threat of another strawchild, that's not wise. It's stupid.