On another forum, i cannot mention the address because i am not sure if i am allowed to do that, i encountered a talk related to tale design vs. tab less design. One of the participants made this reply (translated, because it's not in english): POST 1: A post followed, written y someone trying to convince him that: 1: SQL has nothing to do with HTML 2: A CSS driven website is ore flexible than a table based one. his response followed: Regarding the fact that an SQL has nothing to do with HTML: I mention that up to the first post there was nothing in that topic that had at least the slightest reference to SQl. So his final conclusion is that We should use tables instead of divs, and that because SQL is HTML, and from his first post, i understood that SQL parses only table based layouts. I am sorry to bother you, but those kind of people exist, and they call themselves web designers. Have fun trying to understand his logic, because i did not!
This is the bottom line I've used when designing. Tables are meant for exactly that, tabular data. Divs are meant for design. If you need to design something, use divs. If you have a bunch of data, use tables. It's as simple as that.
I agree completely. Also, my personal preference is to avoid using divs for content which can be better represented by styling a pre-designed tag (e.g. rather than using a div for a heading, use a H1 or H2 tag). I think the example above is an exception rather than the norm, it's quite difficult to completely misinterpret the way that SQL works!