>> now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool"

You want to know what's "uncool" around here for me? Wanting to markup a table with table elements, mostly for the accessibility benefits. I've never seen such an odd pushback. Tables are so "old" I'm told.

Actually, what people frown upon is using tables for layout. Using them to display actual tabular data is quite fine. (I mean, everything is fine at the end of the day as long as the end-user is happy, but you know what I mean...)

No, you don't understand. I don't want to use tables for layout, I want to use tables to display a good old-fashioned table. A table displayed in an otherwise normally marked up page. That is what's getting the pushback.

I guess I could say I want to use table elements to layout a table, which would trigger the "don't use tables for layout" argument.

They're misunderstanding what people mean by "don't use tables". And they don't know what they're talking about.

When I was informed of it, I responded with "they are wrong". We'll see how it goes.

Is your intent for Section 508 compliance?

If the table cells have specific individual widths and heights, and contain a .gif or .jpg of equal size within them, then that is an inappropriate use of tables today.

This "no table for layout" thing is so strong that people keep insisting that I am saying table elements for layout. I am literally saying "using table elements for a table" and not "layout with a table". It is a table with tabular data in it, just plain text. It is a styled table, but a table nonetheless.

So... ignore them? If you want to use a table for tabular data, then please - use a table!

If someone whines you've used a table, then ignore their whining and keep using table markup for tabular data.

Well, ignoring the situation is not a solution to this particular problem.

If it gets really bad, just mock them openly. Sure, you might not achieve your objective, but you'll have fun not getting there.

That's the normal way to do a table. Why import a dozen different libraries to render something that is HTML-included and renders in like 0 time because it's built right into the fucking browser.

> even though I haven't perfected LAMP by a long shot yet..

I've been doing this for 25 years, and I've felt the same way over and over - by the time I feel even a little bit comfortable with an approach, everybody else has already seemed to dip their toe in it, pronounced it unusable, and moved on to the next shiny thing, and wondered why I'm still over here banging rocks together.

But LAMP hasn't become outdated in 2-3 years. It has been steadily dating for a long time.

If your school taught you LAMP as "current" then that is the issue here.