A colleague of mine just dug up some old training material that I created in 2003 for an internal HTML training course at my company. We had a chuckle about the following section:
Tables are used to give the designer greater control over the layout of the page and positioning of elements. Tables give web pages their beauty by facilitating exact layouts in ways that normal formatting (align etc) doesn’t. Tables are where HTML gets REALLY REALLY cool!
There is also some great stuff in there about effective use of the <font> tag, but I have already embarassed myself enough for one day.
When I wrote that I was oblivious to the benefits of semantic markup and standards compliance. We never had an issue about building our site using the table methods and we were pretty bloody good at it. It’s amazing how things have changed in just 4 years!
