I've learned HTML twenty years ago approximately and had learned and unlearned several ways and have seen silver bullets come and go. Actually it seems to me YOU haven't been around long enough to know what was the reason for the "do not use tables for layouts" and then see the mess caused by those that took it to the extremes.

If it is a table, it should be a <table>, if it ain't a table, it should not be a <table>!

I agree that the <ul> is fairly ... erm ... weird. It's in no way related to HTML tables though. <ul> is an unordered list. At the time PerlMonks were written it made sense. <ul> does create indentation even with no stylesheets and can be nested. Even if CSS were available at the time, the site needed to support browsers that did not support CSS.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.