Comment by jkrejcha
2 days ago
Eh. HTML in its recent iterations made it very clear to try and separate itself from layout concerns. It's why <font> was deprecated.
With that: <table> is really only meant for actual tabular data and not about layout. It really isn't about the layout. It got abused for layout because it was the only thing that worked in a lot of cases (especially amusingly enough, email)
<b> and <i> I think I'd agree, even if they did eventually get retconned to be "bring attention to" and "idiomatic text". Same with <strong> and friends. This happened with other elements too.
I think it's fair to acknowledge the realities (people who are writing HTML a lot of times use <b> to mean "bold") of usages but ideally the semantic meanings are useful. I have seen cases where "<strong>" emphasizes it by doing something other than bold for example
> HTML in its recent iterations made it very clear to try and separate itself from layout concerns.
That's what I'm saying, it's a general design principle for new developments, but that's it. (And I don't think that's a good one)
> It really isn't about the layout. It got abused for layout
It wasn't abused for layout, it was all about layout in the first place. If it was about data it would never have been possible to “abuse” it for layout, because an heterogeneous table with nested sub tables makes no sense from a “data” point of view. The fact that this was supported from the beginning shows what it was built for.
> but ideally the semantic meanings are useful. I have seen cases where "<strong>" emphasizes it by doing something other than bold for example
But I agree with that. I'm not saying we shouldn't have semantics elements in HTML, I'm saying that pretending that HTML “is only about data” is silly in a world were something like 80% of HTML tags in web apps are <div> and <span> that are here only for layout purpose.