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.