Relatedly (yet unrelatedly) I worked at a place where the IT team were given a bunch of excel docs to post to the website. They spent weeks taking all the data and created nested div/span sets with hand styling on each cell (because certain IE versions would deal with the styles right unless inline, IIRC), because tables were "depreciated" (sic). the end result looked just like HTML tables, except they were about 5 times as large in HTML, and not anywhere easily as manageable nor usable by screen readers.
"tables are being depreciated - everything should be done with divs" was some mantra at this place for months, and there was no amount of logic or argumentation that would make anyone see sense. Even something like pointing out the W3C spec explicitly still had TABLE as a defined element... that was just false, because tables are "going away". This was... 8 years ago(?)... we still have tables. :/
Well, I'd say not even that. When you're laying out a spreadsheet, just use tables then style them as appropriate. My recommendations were summarily passed over, and I don't work there any more. :)
"tables are being depreciated - everything should be done with divs" was some mantra at this place for months, and there was no amount of logic or argumentation that would make anyone see sense. Even something like pointing out the W3C spec explicitly still had TABLE as a defined element... that was just false, because tables are "going away". This was... 8 years ago(?)... we still have tables. :/
Good times. :)