Eh. HTML in its recent iterations made it very clear to try and separate itself from layout concerns. It's why <font> was deprecated.
With that: <table> is really only meant for actual tabular data and not about layout. It really isn't about the layout. It got abused for layout because it was the only thing that worked in a lot of cases (especially amusingly enough, email)
<b> and <i> I think I'd agree, even if they did eventually get retconned to be "bring attention to" and "idiomatic text". Same with <strong> and friends. This happened with other elements too.
I think it's fair to acknowledge the realities (people who are writing HTML a lot of times use <b> to mean "bold") of usages but ideally the semantic meanings are useful. I have seen cases where "<strong>" emphasizes it by doing something other than bold for example
With that: <table> is really only meant for actual tabular data and not about layout. It really isn't about the layout. It got abused for layout because it was the only thing that worked in a lot of cases (especially amusingly enough, email)
<b> and <i> I think I'd agree, even if they did eventually get retconned to be "bring attention to" and "idiomatic text". Same with <strong> and friends. This happened with other elements too.
I think it's fair to acknowledge the realities (people who are writing HTML a lot of times use <b> to mean "bold") of usages but ideally the semantic meanings are useful. I have seen cases where "<strong>" emphasizes it by doing something other than bold for example