Daniel Mayer wrote:
It is a pure pipe dream to think that tables are going to go away because they are so damn useful and visually appealing to the great majority of our readers.
We could eliminate them through code, i.e. don't let people enter them. This might be (and probably would be!) a terrible idea, but it's important to keep in mind that unlike matters of prose style, etc., we actually can control this one at the level of code-enforced policy.
I'm not saying that we should enforce that there be no tables. But I do agree with the general critique that some of our pages are too "over designed" and that tables have been overused to make pages look pretty, at the expense of simplicity and of the ability to easily render the pages in other media. (Like text-browsers, for instance)
--Jimbo