Those are not semantic because divs have no inherent semantic meaning, while using tables for layouts is not semantic because tables have an inherent semantic meaning that's incorrectly applied to a layout.

Not to mention that tables sized using % are as responsive as 90% of their css counterparts, whatever they are.

Good luck transforming a desktop 3 columns layout in a mobile 2 or single column one. Or viceversa.

90%

Exactly this. How are DIVs more semantic than TABLE? And who is reading the source? Your developers and a web spider. The web spider doesn't care (I wrote one and getting it to parse DIV content and TABLE content wasn't much effort)

As far as I am aware no spider is looking at the DIV and gathering semantic information from it. Sure, it may look at the TABLE and initially assume it has tabular data in it, but a tiny bit of logic fixes that.

> And who is reading the source? Your developers and a web spider.

Or blind people using a screenreader?

DIVs aren't entirely semantic, but table is semantically wrong for how it's being used. It'd be like if I asked you to "get me the pencil off that thingie" and pointed at a chair with a pencil on it. As opposed to "get me the pencil off that table" while pointing at the same chair with a pencil on it.

Which tiny bit of logic can distinguish between tabular and non-tabular tables?

DIVs are not actively anti-semantic. They are just a-semantic. So they're not particularly right, they're just not actively wrong.

Screen readers and spiders do look at tables as semantic content though. Tables are simply the wrong idea.

That said, CSS layout should have been based on tables/grids from the get go, ie. specify a set of blocks as rows and cells, with colspan and rowspan. It took way too long to get to this point.