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I am too young to have ever used tables for anything else than table data. I am almost 30 years old today and have worked as a dev my whole career. We sure hav

I am too young to have ever used tables for anything else than table data. I am almost 30 years old today and have worked as a dev my whole career. We sure have made some progress!

adamcccc 8y ago
I take it, that you've never had to work with html emails then? groans You lucky soul!
- mscasts 8y ago
  I have, but I have always used normal html+css?
  - sosborn 8y ago
    That works for simple emails, but when you start creating more complex designs tables are an essential tool to ensuring that every element behaves as you would expect: https://templates.mailchimp.com/getting-started/html-email-basics/ https://templates.mailchimp.com/getting-started/html-email-b... Building these types of emails without tables is doable, but you are going to get a lot of inconsistency depending on the device/client/browser.
    - jermaustin1 8y ago
      I had worked on a project in 2010. It was a service that let you pick email stationary, customize it, and had a Outlook add-in and a bookmarklet. It "worked" in Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010), Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. And had to display correctly to the recipient in each of those clients. It was by far the biggest pain in the ass I've ever worked on. Tables weren't enough to make it work outright. Outlook 2007+ couldn't do background images on a table cell, gmail would collapse empty cells, hotmail would remove certain inline styles, and yahoo was actually pretty nice. The company I worked for took the project on for an equity split + payment plan, we saw a few hundred dollars from it before they went out of business.
- rurp 8y ago
  Creating HTML emails for Outlook is what I imagine the entire web was like several decades ago.
  - dwd 8y ago
    Not so much as you didn't end up trying stuff only to find it didn't work for some client and you could get away with just targeting Netscape and IE on an 800x600 screen. My first website in '96 had a repeatable background image with text over the top. That's still problematic in email templates and easiest to avoid.
arethuza 8y ago
Do a View Source on a HN page!
- folkrav 8y ago
  Oh my god
robohoe 8y ago
Count yourself as lucky for not having to build designs/layouts in tables! Oh what a travesty that was.
Semaphor 8y ago
I'd say you started too late, I'm only 2 years older and when I took my first steps, tables were still a layout tool ;)

I am too young to have ever used tables for anything else than table data. I am almost 30 years old today and have worked as a dev my whole career. We sure have made some progress!

adamcccc 8y ago

I take it, that you've never had to work with html emails then? groans You lucky soul!

mscasts 8y ago
I have, but I have always used normal html+css?
- sosborn 8y ago
  That works for simple emails, but when you start creating more complex designs tables are an essential tool to ensuring that every element behaves as you would expect: https://templates.mailchimp.com/getting-started/html-email-basics/ https://templates.mailchimp.com/getting-started/html-email-b... Building these types of emails without tables is doable, but you are going to get a lot of inconsistency depending on the device/client/browser.
  - jermaustin1 8y ago
    I had worked on a project in 2010. It was a service that let you pick email stationary, customize it, and had a Outlook add-in and a bookmarklet. It "worked" in Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010), Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. And had to display correctly to the recipient in each of those clients. It was by far the biggest pain in the ass I've ever worked on. Tables weren't enough to make it work outright. Outlook 2007+ couldn't do background images on a table cell, gmail would collapse empty cells, hotmail would remove certain inline styles, and yahoo was actually pretty nice. The company I worked for took the project on for an equity split + payment plan, we saw a few hundred dollars from it before they went out of business.
rurp 8y ago
Creating HTML emails for Outlook is what I imagine the entire web was like several decades ago.
- dwd 8y ago
  Not so much as you didn't end up trying stuff only to find it didn't work for some client and you could get away with just targeting Netscape and IE on an 800x600 screen. My first website in '96 had a repeatable background image with text over the top. That's still problematic in email templates and easiest to avoid.

arethuza 8y ago

Do a View Source on a HN page!

folkrav 8y ago
Oh my god

robohoe 8y ago

Count yourself as lucky for not having to build designs/layouts in tables! Oh what a travesty that was.

Semaphor 8y ago

I'd say you started too late, I'm only 2 years older and when I took my first steps, tables were still a layout tool ;)