First, its proponents go on, at some length, about the need to separate formatting from content. Except that in common usage, commercial and recreational publications, in fact, in just about everything but the most strictly constructed scientific or mathematical publications, formatting is part of the content.
When you are reading instructions for a medication, for instance, it is not incidental nor trivial that a paragraph is printed in bold, red letters, that formatting is communicating something vital to you.
Second, in the old, table-based days of formatting, I could teach HTML to almost anyone on a quiet afternoon. Now there is a cottage industry for classes, thick books and online instruction to produce exactly the same results, only with far greater effort.
On the matter of Accessibility, I understand and take responsibility for making websites accessible, that are easily read by screen reader software, for instance. And here the CSS proponents will proclaim that Cascading Style Sheets make sites much more accessible. Maybe. I think though, that it would have been much easier to teach people to assemble their tables, and for software makers to construct their programs in ways to make sites easily accessible.
Yes, I know that CSS is now the standard, and that we are stuck with it. I know that is does some cool tricks like making it easy for one site to be viewed in several styles, (a trick that is impressive the first time, but gets old quickly.) I know that to appear truly conversant with web site development, one must use CSS to position elements, however randomly in various browsers, and avoid tables like nettles in a nudist colony, but still, I remember a time when is was all so much more straightforward and much simpler.
Here endeth the rant.
Orator Pro Angelus Populus
