My daughter (7 years old) used HTML to make a website

got 93 on performance, 89 on best practices, 73 on SEO on lighthouse :)

Table are used when tables are needed. Excel like overviews. No reason to not use tables. For site layouts (multiple columns etc) you would better use divs in a flexbox or something.

While i do not share the opinion that jobs was such a genius at all, reducing him to be just a marketer seems very narrow-minded.

Sometimes it's about bundling potential rather than exploitation. I have read many stories of the people who worked for jobs, not many of the "first ones" seem to tell stories of being exploited. But many seem to be proud of how much work they put into their work guided by a guy who seems to be there mostly for saying yey or ney. Which seems to be crucial.

Think about all the dysfunctional organizations you have seen or worked with. In my experience, most of them were lacking clarity, responsibility, personal investment & decisions.

The potential to end all wars, end hunger, free societies etc is there. I mean just on HN, the potential to transform the world by tomorrow is there. There is enough people with good will, enough people in key positions, enough people who are the best in their field, enough people who love to hack away as a side project, enough people who enjoy debating etc... here on HN.

All that is missing is the right approach to get a few of these people together with the right goal and by tomorrow we could take out / stop a lot of evil. This person must be able to "market", to bundle potential. But this person must also be able to identify potential & make hard decisions & do the things others would call "insensitive". Otherwise the people would quickly lose interest or be lost in chaos.

Focusing potential seems to be the most crucial part. Having a lot of potential but high entropy seems to be irrelevant in most cases.

Anyway, had to type it out because i just realized that partially i am doing the same mistake with my startup. Too stuck fiddling on the tech while knowing that i should be focusing on bundling potential. Currently i am just contributing to a entropic potential, which serves no one. Bundling it might serve the right people, at the right time with the right people.

Which infects my mind with the question i have been struggling with: is there any way someone like jobs could have been more than just a marketer in your eyes?

I do feel like i am looking down upon people like jobs who seem to be happy with just talking and never trying to really do the things themselves. On the other hand having this opinion of potential entropy... what do you think?

Edit: just wanted to add the after thought that people most likely call these people geniuses, whose way of achieving results they can't quite comprehend. And usually for people too attached from the problematic domain, the same geniuses could appear like idiots or sharlatans.

You almost got me. After all why not? So I had to go read stuff, and think more about it than I would have. So thanks for this.

So: is probably mostly fine, but not great, and not good practice.

The ARIA spec [1] says:

> 2. Notes on ARIA Use in HTML

> 2.1 First Rule of ARIA Use

> If you can use a native HTML element [HTML51] or attribute with the semantics and behavior you require already built in, instead of re-purposing an element and adding an ARIA role, state or property to make it accessible, then do so.

That's because simpler is easily more accessible. ARIA is last resort, when all else failed. ARIA is complex and not always well implemented, or implemented at all, and when it is implemented, interpretations can differ. Your content will be more accessible to more users / for more browsers if it doesn't rely on ARIA to be accessible. And more often than not, you can do more harm than good by using aria attributes, because it's easy to misuse them, which is worse than not using them at all. Now, ARIA is still very useful and should be used when it improves things over what HTML/CSS supports by itself, but table-based layouts have readily available HTML/CSS solutions.

My opinion is that there's no good reason today to use tables for presentation. One of the reasons is always the same: separation of concerns. Structure your content, in the simplest possible way, and then style it. Structured content, with a structure that's as simple as possible, is more easily accessible. Add divs if really necessary for styling (which don't really change the structure, since they don't have meaning - keeping in mind that they are a compromise).

It's funny how everyone seem convinced by the principle of separation of concerns, except for HTML/CSS/JS.

You could use divs with display:table(-row|-cell) for the same result. Although CSS flex or CSS grid would let you achieve the same thing with a simpler structure and will allow you to have a responsive design. Fat tables with side menus are unwieldy on small screens and your -based structure will make it more difficult to offer a usable design to them.

Table layout are also not great on text / terminal-based browsers. Letting the content flow from top to bottom will be way better. You have this for free if you don't use tables, because usually terminal browsers don't understand CSS.

I would then reverse the question: why use tables when you can use display:table, CSS Flexbox or CSS Grid? What are the benefits? Especially when they are simpler as soon as you learned once how to do your favorite layout using these "new" things. I won't be convinced by any answer that sounds like "I don't really want to learn this stuff" because if we are trying to answer "What is the most correct way to do this", we should seek to use the better version, not the one we are familiar with.

It seems to me "Why not use ?" is a bit like "Why not use this carafe labeled 'this is a glass' as a glass?". Sure, why not, it will work, but if you have a glass now, even if you need to pour the water into the glass before you can drink it, isn't it better? (of course, maybe not the best analogy, I'm not good at analogies, but I hope it can help understand my perspective on ).

I also believe role="presentation" or role="none" is a code smell. It has legitimate uses (I guess), but the use better be clearly justified.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/using-aria/