worth saying that my argument has nothing to do with css vs tables, but I dont agree with this at all, it may be object code to you, but it is always source code to the client, the browser that has to render it, the screenscraper that wants to pull data from it, the client side scripts that want to modify it.

another disagreement I have with it is that even though it may be generated by whatever fancy backend you want, it is still source code to you, there are very few(no?) powerful html generation libraries that let you generate html as an intermediary format, before writing the "html compiler" you need to understand the html you are compiling.

asm is usually referred to as object code because there are very few people comprehend assembly language at the moment, there was a time when asm (or the binary code itself) could be referred to as source code, but those are long past for most people, web toolkits havent matured that far, you can write perfectly great assembly code without knowing any of it though c, you cannot write a program that generates nice web pages without knowing html and css (right now)