Stackoverflow uses tables for questions/answers, I was told by many SO users that this was wrong and that questions and answers are not tabular data.
So now I ask, are forums tabular data? Most major forums (vbulletin) I beleive all are using tables.
I am assuming this is considered tabular but I would like a second or more opinion ?
I think a good rule of thumb is whether or not it would make sense to present the content in question in a spreadsheet.
SO and other forums for sure use a relational schema (which envolves tables) to store the data. As far as HTML and layout goes, i'm not sure. No Firebug here :P
I'm certainly no web wiz, but structurally I'd say forum posts with associated (possibly nested) comments are more like lists than they are like tables.
Technically, the data is tabular if you can put a header on the columns, because each column of 'td' needs to be headed with a 'th' for it to really be semantically correct.
So if you can put a logical header on each of the columns, go for it!
No. While many forums do use tables for their markup, it should be recognized that this is physical markup and not semantically correct markup.
Forum discussions, if anything, are nested lists (i.e. trees) so to be really correct they should be modelled as nested <ul> elements in tree discussions, or as <dl>s (definition lists, which basically associates several values (= answers) with one key (= question)) to reflect Stack Overflow’s question-answer form.
No. Tables are used wrong on both SO and those forums, that is to a certain extent.
As it stands css has certain limitations. For example you can't have two divs share the same height, or you may need to vertical align text that spans over several rows. Perhaps your design is both fluid and fixed in a holy grail kind of way. These forums have to implement all these, making it very difficult to ensure a constant cross browser experience.
So their reasoning doesn't have anything to do with semantics, but rather convenience.