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Can't be any worse than bootstrap's col / grid system.

I've actually never even tried to understand people's issue with tables. I think there are important places to take stands in my life and I guess that <table> isn't one of them. I'm more of a "generalist" than a front-end dev but that being said, I would guess that you would have more control for responsive layouts with bootstrap's grid system than using HTML tables. If I'm using table cells I can have them stretch or squeeze to fit the screen but it's trivial with Bootstrap's grid to change the number of div's in a row depending on screen size. I don't believe that is achievable with basic HTML tables.

The argument was/is that ‘table’ should have semantic meaning; you use it for tabulation of facts. Most people were using it to create arbitrary containers.

Some people have taken it too far, and refuse to use tables even for representing actual tables of data.

I believe it's a weird kind of misunderstanding. Tables were declared bad when the rule was still "mark up meaning, not physical look".

Today, websites are mostly designed in a fixed layout (well, two - desktop and mobile), so the argument against tables makes no sense anymore.

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