5 ms·

We had a simpler standard in 1995. It was called tables and it did this exceptionally well and more importantly was easy enough for even amateurs to understand.

We had a simpler standard in 1995. It was called tables and it did this exceptionally well and more importantly was easy enough for even amateurs to understand. And then armchair demagogues decided that markup should no longer be used for markup, setting web layout back decades and creating the field of web designers whose major accomplishment was understanding stupid div hacks.

rimantas 10y ago
Your comment is the best example of the demagogue. Zero understanding of the issue, the problems that tables caused. But it was easy, right?
- BugsJustFindMe 10y ago
  Every time this subject comes up, someone trots out the old canard that tables messed with screen readers and therefore were irretrievably bad. Or they say from the highest and mightiest and ivoryest pedestal "separation of semantics and display, thus spaketh the lord" pretending, of course, that modern websites look and behave just like documents when that's demonstrably false, and that tables are therefore irretrievably bad. And instead you now have, 20 years later (TWENTY! YEARS!) something that only now works as well for layout. Adding "not-data" and navigation directives to tables to aid screen readers and separate semantics would not have taken 20 years. And now you'll have to wait another 5 years before this new, "just as good as tables!" feature is sufficiently widespread to actually deploy it without a polyfill shim. But please tell me more about what I do or don't know.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Better than naked ad hominem and the silly assumption that people on a site largely aimed at web developers aren't as smart as you are.
raspasov 10y ago
It's pretty amazing, isn't it, the type of infinitely useless brain loops we can get stuck in. Especially when we fail to take a step back and ask the question "Is this really the right way?".
- visarga 10y ago
  In 1995 I was creating a layout engine for a UI manager (personal project). It was simpler to use and I had better primitives. Had I known then that in 2017 we will still discuss about layouts, I would have face palmed so hard. In my opinion CSS's worst sin is that it does not include basic experience from other programming languages: variables and name scoping. It's a minefield of namespace collisions and superfluous repetitions.
stan_rogers 10y ago
It did it exceptionally poorly, and out-of-order source that was damn near impossible to modify was the norm.

rimantas 10y ago

Your comment is the best example of the demagogue. Zero understanding of the issue, the problems that tables caused. But it was easy, right?

BugsJustFindMe 10y ago
Every time this subject comes up, someone trots out the old canard that tables messed with screen readers and therefore were irretrievably bad. Or they say from the highest and mightiest and ivoryest pedestal "separation of semantics and display, thus spaketh the lord" pretending, of course, that modern websites look and behave just like documents when that's demonstrably false, and that tables are therefore irretrievably bad. And instead you now have, 20 years later (TWENTY! YEARS!) something that only now works as well for layout. Adding "not-data" and navigation directives to tables to aid screen readers and separate semantics would not have taken 20 years. And now you'll have to wait another 5 years before this new, "just as good as tables!" feature is sufficiently widespread to actually deploy it without a polyfill shim. But please tell me more about what I do or don't know.
pessimizer 10y ago
Better than naked ad hominem and the silly assumption that people on a site largely aimed at web developers aren't as smart as you are.

raspasov 10y ago

It's pretty amazing, isn't it, the type of infinitely useless brain loops we can get stuck in. Especially when we fail to take a step back and ask the question "Is this really the right way?".

visarga 10y ago
In 1995 I was creating a layout engine for a UI manager (personal project). It was simpler to use and I had better primitives. Had I known then that in 2017 we will still discuss about layouts, I would have face palmed so hard. In my opinion CSS's worst sin is that it does not include basic experience from other programming languages: variables and name scoping. It's a minefield of namespace collisions and superfluous repetitions.

stan_rogers 10y ago

It did it exceptionally poorly, and out-of-order source that was damn near impossible to modify was the norm.