The screen shot at the end of this post shows some of the HTML behind the main gmail.com page. I never looked before, so it came as a shock to me how many DIVs were used to construct the page. There are more than are visible as the document scrolled and I had only opened a particular sub-branch of the page.

According to the Chrome Developer Tools, there are 590 DIVs (in my inbox)!

So, are DIVs really better than TABLEs? Tables would be used to present data, and not just for layout in the case of Gmail.

Gmail has 11 TABLE elements on the page:

What would you do if you were creating a messaging application like Gmail?