title: Forum Layout: Table or Divs?
body: <p>I've been thinking about this for a few days and wondered which would be the better layout option for making a forum: Tables or Divs?</p>
  
  <p>Now to be specific, there are a few criteria here:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>It will be in the familiar tabular presentation most forums use, such as the phpBB default theme.</li>
  <li>It must be able to be responsive, ie if you want columns to be hidden at certain screen sizes, the whole row must be clickable, etc.</li>
  <li>It must be easily re-stylable for custom skins.</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>My initial thought is that tables tend to have issues in responsive layouts, and the typical forum layout can be accomplished via divs, though they may require somewhat hacky approaches depending.</p>
  
  <p>Is there really a benefit to either format? Would a Table layout be easier for a search engine to crawl? I'm trying to avoid too much opinion based points such as preference of divs over tables, unless there is a really strong case for it.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT</strong></p>
  
  <p>There seems to be come confusion as to my question so I'm going to clarify. My question is not about the website format in its entirety. In fact, the project this is for is utilizing bootstrap. My question is: are there advantages to using tables for the <em>Forum</em> layout, ie where the forum categories are listed, the threads are listed, etc. These things are practically tabular data. What about tables for <em>that</em>. It's not purely data, but it is still somewhat tabular in its nature.</p>
  
  <p>Once again, my question is not to discuss the merits of Tables for web page layouts, as the "Possible Duplicate" suggests.</p>