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Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? Google 'pure css page footer' to see the wreckag

Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? Google 'pure css page footer' to see the wreckage. CSS tables took years to be supported, and even then, only brought back what people had been irrationally told to stay away from. It took another 5 years for flex box to become usable, adding something actually new. To this day, changing a site's entire design without touching its markup is a mirage. It only works in contrived scenarios with extremely artificial restrictions, and nobody does it in the real world. CSS Zen Garden was demoscene.

cygx 7y ago
Personally, I was fine with ditching tables, but stuff like differing box models, unequal CSS support, quirks modes, etc did make for a rather painful cross-browser development experience: Making things work out correctly (or at least gracefully degrade) in multipe IE versions, Mozilla, Opera, ... could be a challenge.
pbhjpbhj 7y ago
Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational. You don't come from print design by any chance? With flexbox, for example, you can change order of appearance contrary to the code order in the markup. It's not a mirage. Anyone who's used a browser's reader mode, or distilled view (as Brave calls it), knows the usefulness of applying different styles to a fixed markup. Separation of presentation is possible. Indeed now we've moved to responsive design and the number of devices and UA has exploded the separation of design and data is coming in to its own -- but instead pixel-perfection is still being chased with a billion @media declarations.
- cygx 7y ago
  You don't come from print design by any chance? You've not been doing that whole web design thing for very long, by any chance? Those of us who have been around for a while do remember the inadequate layouting capabilities of CSS of bygone eras. While I was on the semantic markup side of the debate at the time, it's not as if the pragmatists that just went with the table for convenience's sake did so for no reason at all...
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I started web design for lynx browser, back when using pine for email was hot, then moved on to Mosaic and NN. There's a clear body of web design/dev people that think it's just a visual display medium, and a lot of those seem to come from print design. The web for me has always been primarily a medium for information transfer, visual design is nice but not at the expense of semantic markup; table markup for visual layout is entirely unnecessary (and was terrible for accessibility). People went with table layout because marketing people demanded pixel matched presentation and/or they didn't care to make sure their content was machine readable. The same views lead to IE only and give us websites that don't bother with semantic blocks now, or that don't work without JavaScript when that js is just being used for presentational flair.
    - cygx 7y ago
      My mistake, then. Point is, you didn't need to start off in print design to end up with certain attitudes under discussion. Customers demanded it, and you can only do so much trying to convince them otherwise. For another, wishing for a certain amount of control over the layout seems like an entirely reasonable demand to me (eg you should not need to jump through hoops just to place something in the center of the viewport). Lastly, if we're being honest, how much has semantic markup improved the web experience in practice, and how much did layout tables hurt us? When I used to do web design, I was a good citizen, avoiding layout table and arguing for semantic markup. But nowadays, I'm far more forgiving, though I still think there's some value in it insofar as proper markup can improve the screen reader experience.
- javagram 7y ago
  > Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational. Aren't you talking past each other? The issue is that with initial versions of CSS, replicating the powerful layout possibilities of tabular markup was not possible. Developers generally built layouts using "float" instead, and had trouble replicating some of the standard table features like keeping columns the same height. Only with full CSS 2.1 implementation in IE8 did this state of affairs change, at that point you could apply rules like "display: table" to DIVs and get the same layout possibilities without using tables. Flexbox, on the other hand, is actually an improvement (are are Grid Layout and Template Layout Modules). But it didn't come until after CSS 2.1.
rangerpolitic 7y ago
> Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? I never really understood why people had such difficulty with this. I was able to execute table-less layouts while still supporting IE5 on Mac. > To this day, changing a site's entire design without touching its markup is a mirage. That's only because HTML authoring is dead. No one writes HTML well these days. Just look at tools like Elementor. How many nested divs do you need to add a faux button to a website? It's ridiculous. Write well-structured, semantic HTML being mindful of a separation of concerns, and flipping between stylesheets is a piece of cake.
- dmitriid 7y ago
  > Write well-structured, semantic HTML being mindful of a separation of concerns I keep hearing about this mythical beast, and yet I have never seen one beyond the simplest of text-only blogs.
  - rangerpolitic 7y ago
    You don't see it because either (a) people don't do it or (b) people are using HTML as a markup language for apps rather than documents. HTML was created to be used for documents. It was coopted to be used for apps. They really should have come up with a different language for apps.
    - dmitriid 7y ago
      Why people don’t use it in a) would be an interesting discussion. And I fully agree on b): HTML (+ CSS) is wholly inadequate for app development.
- jandrese 7y ago
  Can you give us a link to your elegant table-less IE5 supporting website? I would like to see how you achieved it. I lost a lot of hair trying to make a simple 3 column layout where the middle column would scale to the width of the window and could consist of multiple DIVs in a vertical row, all of the same width. AKA "baby's first blog" layout. Something that should have been one of the design cases for CSS.

cygx 7y ago

Personally, I was fine with ditching tables, but stuff like differing box models, unequal CSS support, quirks modes, etc did make for a rather painful cross-browser development experience: Making things work out correctly (or at least gracefully degrade) in multipe IE versions, Mozilla, Opera, ... could be a challenge.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational. You don't come from print design by any chance? With flexbox, for example, you can change order of appearance contrary to the code order in the markup. It's not a mirage. Anyone who's used a browser's reader mode, or distilled view (as Brave calls it), knows the usefulness of applying different styles to a fixed markup. Separation of presentation is possible. Indeed now we've moved to responsive design and the number of devices and UA has exploded the separation of design and data is coming in to its own -- but instead pixel-perfection is still being chased with a billion @media declarations.

cygx 7y ago
You don't come from print design by any chance? You've not been doing that whole web design thing for very long, by any chance? Those of us who have been around for a while do remember the inadequate layouting capabilities of CSS of bygone eras. While I was on the semantic markup side of the debate at the time, it's not as if the pragmatists that just went with the table for convenience's sake did so for no reason at all...
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I started web design for lynx browser, back when using pine for email was hot, then moved on to Mosaic and NN. There's a clear body of web design/dev people that think it's just a visual display medium, and a lot of those seem to come from print design. The web for me has always been primarily a medium for information transfer, visual design is nice but not at the expense of semantic markup; table markup for visual layout is entirely unnecessary (and was terrible for accessibility). People went with table layout because marketing people demanded pixel matched presentation and/or they didn't care to make sure their content was machine readable. The same views lead to IE only and give us websites that don't bother with semantic blocks now, or that don't work without JavaScript when that js is just being used for presentational flair.
  - cygx 7y ago
    My mistake, then. Point is, you didn't need to start off in print design to end up with certain attitudes under discussion. Customers demanded it, and you can only do so much trying to convince them otherwise. For another, wishing for a certain amount of control over the layout seems like an entirely reasonable demand to me (eg you should not need to jump through hoops just to place something in the center of the viewport). Lastly, if we're being honest, how much has semantic markup improved the web experience in practice, and how much did layout tables hurt us? When I used to do web design, I was a good citizen, avoiding layout table and arguing for semantic markup. But nowadays, I'm far more forgiving, though I still think there's some value in it insofar as proper markup can improve the screen reader experience.
javagram 7y ago
> Tabular markup for non-tabulated data is not rational & semantic markup is certainly not irrational. Aren't you talking past each other? The issue is that with initial versions of CSS, replicating the powerful layout possibilities of tabular markup was not possible. Developers generally built layouts using "float" instead, and had trouble replicating some of the standard table features like keeping columns the same height. Only with full CSS 2.1 implementation in IE8 did this state of affairs change, at that point you could apply rules like "display: table" to DIVs and get the same layout possibilities without using tables. Flexbox, on the other hand, is actually an improvement (are are Grid Layout and Template Layout Modules). But it didn't come until after CSS 2.1.

rangerpolitic 7y ago

> Did you miss the 5-10 years during which every CSS designer tortured themselves replicating tables with floats? I never really understood why people had such difficulty with this. I was able to execute table-less layouts while still supporting IE5 on Mac. > To this day, changing a site's entire design without touching its markup is a mirage. That's only because HTML authoring is dead. No one writes HTML well these days. Just look at tools like Elementor. How many nested divs do you need to add a faux button to a website? It's ridiculous. Write well-structured, semantic HTML being mindful of a separation of concerns, and flipping between stylesheets is a piece of cake.

dmitriid 7y ago
> Write well-structured, semantic HTML being mindful of a separation of concerns I keep hearing about this mythical beast, and yet I have never seen one beyond the simplest of text-only blogs.
- rangerpolitic 7y ago
  You don't see it because either (a) people don't do it or (b) people are using HTML as a markup language for apps rather than documents. HTML was created to be used for documents. It was coopted to be used for apps. They really should have come up with a different language for apps.
  - dmitriid 7y ago
    Why people don’t use it in a) would be an interesting discussion. And I fully agree on b): HTML (+ CSS) is wholly inadequate for app development.
jandrese 7y ago
Can you give us a link to your elegant table-less IE5 supporting website? I would like to see how you achieved it. I lost a lot of hair trying to make a simple 3 column layout where the middle column would scale to the width of the window and could consist of multiple DIVs in a vertical row, all of the same width. AKA "baby's first blog" layout. Something that should have been one of the design cases for CSS.