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Email clients are stuck in late 90s-era formatting, and alas, tables are very very necessary to create cross platform emails that render identically (or at least similarly). Yes it's the "wrong way" but it also works well for older clients and odd situations where full CSS support is lacking.

Have you viewed the HTML source of HN? There are lots of reasons to dislike nested tables, but they do have their uses.

eh, religion

Sure, except if you've worked with full web pages made of tables throughout, you know how they usually suck in terms of maintenance and how hard it is to make changes. It's also just a lot more boilerplate compared to doing it "the right way".

But if you know what you're doing, and you know why exactly you need a table here to do this particular thing (which should not be your entire web page due to maintenance issues), then go ahead and use a table. Like for emails it's pretty much a necessity (along with style attributes, sigh).