> Tables are the lists of html. The W3C doesn't like you to use tables to do more than display tabular data because then it's unclear what a table cell means. But this sort of ambiguity is not always an error. It might be an accurate reflection of the programmer's state of mind. [...]
Note that it's traditional html tables pg is referencing. I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the 'display' properties options: 'table', 'table-row', 'table-cell' etc, were not well supported (in IE particularly) or even existent at the time pg wrote the code. So he may not believe the same now.
> The predefined libraries just do everything with tables. Why? Because Arc is tuned for exploratory programming, and the W3C-approved way of doing things represents the opposite spirit.
I don't agree. My understanding is that traditional tables are ridged, which is why they suggest you only put data into it. They are highlighting that it's, generally, not suitable for other things. Divs allow for more flexible manipulation. For example, I can create a table and then decide to break out of the table somewhere in the middle of it's content to render some component. Or I can make a table and morph it into something different by only changing it's properties via css/js.
But pg was not writing web apps. He was writing web pages and then calling a new page for, pretty much, ANY change. So from that perspective (where you can macro away server side) you can see why pg would just put it all in a table and highlight how using arc macros will let you do more compose-able things.
