I think you're misremembering history. It's not bad because 'it violates the separation between content and presentation', it's bad because you end up with tag soup. The table's demise was purely that it was too hard to maintain in anything more than a trivial layout. When you started getting down to your third nested table it was a friggin' nightmare. Also cells and rows had weird quirks as well as missing properties where you'd then have to nest a span in every cell just to get it behaving properly. Oh and also the occasional sacrifice to the dark god of 'table-layout:fixed'.
But I think we agree. Layouts with nested tables are hard to maintain because presentational concerns (like the attributes which defines cell sizes) is spread all over the document and intermingled with the content. It's a mess.
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I think you're misremembering history. It's not bad because 'it violates the separation between content and presentation', it's bad because you end up with tag soup. The table's demise was purely that it was too hard to maintain in anything more than a trivial layout. When you started getting down to your third nested table it was a friggin' nightmare. Also cells and rows had weird quirks as well as missing properties where you'd then have to nest a span in every cell just to get it behaving properly. Oh and also the occasional sacrifice to the dark god of 'table-layout:fixed'.
The rest of it though I agree with you.
But I think we agree. Layouts with nested tables are hard to maintain because presentational concerns (like the attributes which defines cell sizes) is spread all over the document and intermingled with the content. It's a mess.