My first experience as a young kid in the 90's doing web design was taking the msn.com home page (I thought it looked nice back then) looking at the source, and

My first experience as a young kid in the 90's doing web design was taking the msn.com home page (I thought it looked nice back then) looking at the source, and learning. Turns out layout was done using tables. Cool, putting it into practice though it was really really hard. The primary force you were always fighting against was inconsistency between browsers. You might get everything perfect in IE, then load it in Netscape and there's huge gaps between your awesome solid colored navigation side blocks. Then making it adjust to the size of the browser was another struggle. After a while I learned to just make everything fixed size. Then content inside continues to nest you have to keep subdividing, and things would start to get out of whack. You adjust one block here, and the side suddenly has these weird gaps. A large part of it was almost certainly the fact that I was about 13 or 14 years old at the time, and I learned only by looking at example code... but It was really difficult. flexbox doesn't really seem to suffer from the problems that made table layout really suck. I use it mostly indirectly by using the library Bulma, but it's really wonderful.