I think the don't-use-tables argument is from way before mobile devices were something web developers cared about. I recall it as being mostly about semantics, i.e. tables should only be used for tabular data, not setting up the layout of your entire page.
Re:Hell Yes CSS
by nescioquid on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @11:53AM
(#25519514)
That's right. The argument was separating document structure from layout. Using a table for page layout makes the document structure incoherent.
I have never seen anyone arguing <table> was not OK for tabular data.
I thought this was a myth on level of teenagers eating tide pods.
Re:Hell Yes CSS
by strenholme on Wednesday December 23, 2020 @07:18PM
(#25523854)
Those kinds of discussions have dropped off of the Internet over the last decade and a half, being hosted at places like the now defunct original Digg website. It was an era when one could said something really stupid online and it would become mercifully forgotten.
What I have found is a 2014 blog posting where another web designer from that era says “the early anti-HTML table movement was strong. It managed to brainwash many generation of developers into thinking that any usage of table is evil. [...] I am one of those developers who avoided table layout, even for displaying tabular data.”
Reference: https://colintoh.com/blog/display-table-anti-hero
The real reason we don’t use tables for layout (and only for the occasional tabular data) is because a table layout doesn’t work really well on the screen of an iPhone or Android phone, especially when they are vertically aligned. So, the workaround is to use media selectors: Desktops, laptops, and tablets get a table layout; phones get a simpler one-column layout.
I believe grid and flex layouts allow one to use a single design which will appropriately scale from a phone screen to an ultrawide monitor, but I use a two-layout or three-layout design for my web pages.
[1] In the days when the CSS Zen Garden was new, all of the web design blogs and comments felt using <table> for anything at all was heresy, since abusing <table> resulted in really ugly and hard to maintain webpages during the dot-com days of the late 1990s. It would be an extended discussion whether it was OK to even use <table> for clearly tabular data.