HTML is presentation and CSS is the design and one does not mix the two on a properly designed site. If they are independent, it become possible to change the look of the site, independent of the data presented.
Yes, that means you use tables, for tabular data, but forums are not tabular data. They are more akin to lists, which have their own rules.
Yes, that's the propaganda. I don't think reality has worked out that way. At least, I've never seen a site get overhauled via CSS alone on anything other than demo sites designed for that explicit purpose. Since CSS now lets you override anything and turn tables into lists and lists into tables, it hardly matters any more, and the entire concept of "semantic" is just a sick joke unless the word "context" shows up somewhere, which it never seems to in these conversations, and in particular, hasn't got much place here either.
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HTML is presentation and CSS is the design and one does not mix the two on a properly designed site. If they are independent, it become possible to change the look of the site, independent of the data presented.
Yes, that means you use tables, for tabular data, but forums are not tabular data. They are more akin to lists, which have their own rules.
Yes, that's the propaganda. I don't think reality has worked out that way. At least, I've never seen a site get overhauled via CSS alone on anything other than demo sites designed for that explicit purpose. Since CSS now lets you override anything and turn tables into lists and lists into tables, it hardly matters any more, and the entire concept of "semantic" is just a sick joke unless the word "context" shows up somewhere, which it never seems to in these conversations, and in particular, hasn't got much place here either.
I hate to bring that site up, but 4chan's recent overhaul was a move to HTML5 and CSS from table-based design for that very reason.
HN Discussion on it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3902976