I think I somehow replied to the wrong comment of yours, as this conversation should be on the Xiangqi page. But I just got back from a walk and am too tired to deal with that right now.
So if the board is not a table, how would a program specify which image should be drawn where on the page, and to reserve space for that?
If you were to use grid for layout, the HTML element to use would be the DIV for both the board as a whole and for each space, and grid would be used to tell how they line up. If you look at the HTML for a Game Courier preset with a Square shape for the board and CSS for the rendering method, you can see how I've done this. For absolute positioning, you would give the position of each piece in the board with CSS. I have examples of this in Game Courier with the Custom Grid shape (which has nothing to do with CSS grid, as I wrote the code before CSS grid existed) and the CSS rendering method.
Another issue is how to arrange mouse-click input. This is now handled by attaching event handlers (for mouse down or up, touch, hover etc.) to the individual cells, which get the (diagram number, rank, file) as parameters to indicate what was clicked.
For grid, these would attach to DIVs. For absolute positioning, I also create an image map with MAP and AREA elements, and it looks like I'm attaching event handlers to both IMG and AREA elements, possibly for redundancy in case one doesn't work.
I think I somehow replied to the wrong comment of yours, as this conversation should be on the Xiangqi page. But I just got back from a walk and am too tired to deal with that right now.
If you were to use grid for layout, the HTML element to use would be the DIV for both the board as a whole and for each space, and grid would be used to tell how they line up. If you look at the HTML for a Game Courier preset with a Square shape for the board and CSS for the rendering method, you can see how I've done this. For absolute positioning, you would give the position of each piece in the board with CSS. I have examples of this in Game Courier with the Custom Grid shape (which has nothing to do with CSS grid, as I wrote the code before CSS grid existed) and the CSS rendering method.
For grid, these would attach to DIVs. For absolute positioning, I also create an image map with MAP and AREA elements, and it looks like I'm attaching event handlers to both IMG and AREA elements, possibly for redundancy in case one doesn't work.