5 ms·

> All those table tags just felt… wrong. Icky. And yet, I could readily see how not using tables hampered my layout options. I used the Wayback Machine (Than

by torh 5y ago

> All those table tags just felt… wrong. Icky. And yet, I could readily see how not using tables hampered my layout options. I used the Wayback Machine (Thank you, Internet Archive!) to dig up some of my old designs, and boy, I used tables for all it was worth, and then some. Unlike Mr. Meyer, it didn't feel wrong. But again, unlike Mr. Meyer, 25 years ago I was ... let's just say "young", around 13-14. I'm planning to write a small blog post about it some day, because the amount of tables I used for a simple heading is just staggering. It must be at least a full page (in 800x600) for just a simple header. I don't think I can explain how or why without actually posting screenshots.

mjburgess 5y ago
If you think of a table as a discrete coordinate system then it's fairly obvious. You wanted to position things at specific coordinates, and have the browser take care of padding/flowing/etc. A table is a natural choice.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  That's what CSS Grid is for.
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    CSS Grid was not released until many years later.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  At the time, there was serious rage against using table for layout. Everyone had to do it at some point if you wanted proper spacing of elements. Table was one of the only ways to do it and, as you say, a natural choice. But you could easily lose at a job interview if you were a proponent of this.
  - goto11 5y ago
    There were always tradeoffs involved. A site might be legally required to be accessible, or it may be a business decision. Layouts hacked together with floats were a mess to create and maintain, but tended to adapt better to mobile displays. A competent front-end developer should understand pros and cons and be able to handle both approaches. Even today you might have to support old internet explorer, so you cant use display:grid. Of course incompetence can be present on either side of the table in interviews. I have heard about people avoiding display:table in CSS because they heard tables were bad.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Sure, I was there. cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUjDMdSwefk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUjDMdSwefk
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      How is that youtube link relevant?
      - mjburgess 5y ago
        I was making a humorous reference to the song, via the line "I was there", > To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin. I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties. > But I'm losing my edge. I'm losing my edge, but I was there. I was there. But I was there. It's a song which has a type of nostalgia analogous to the one in this thread.
  - blacktriangle 5y ago
    At this time it was a perfectly example of why CSS specialists and developers forced into using CSS were talking past each other. The purists insulted table layouts with good reason, but the best they could offer was crazy tricks with floats that made semantically as little sense as tables. Now that CSS grid is finally useable both sides can agree on a proper answer, but this is 20 years later. That's the thing about purists, they're not wrong in pointing out the problems, but they're often so obsessed with the problems they fail to critically evaluate the alternative solutions and realize they are also terrible.
- goto11 5y ago
  > If you think of a table as a discrete coordinate system then it's fairly obvious. Unfortunately tables did not work like a coordinate system, since cells would grow to accommodate their content. Combined with spacer gifs, tables could be used to generate whitespace padding and aligning content, but it was very tricky to use tables for exact positioning.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Ah, a discrete non-linear coordinate system :)
  - torh 5y ago
    That 1x1 pixel space.gif was sure used a lot back in the days.
conradfr 5y ago
It didn't feel wrong but it was tedious. Especially when you wanted to do rounded corners, with tables and sliced images. At least it was/is easy to vertically center the content of the cell. Unlike divs, for reasons that still escape me. If you want to cash in on that table knowledge nowadays, just do email templates ;)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- giantrobot 5y ago
  > It didn't feel wrong but it was tedious. Every WYSIWYG HTML editor made it super easy to us...abuse tables for layouts. IIRC Dreamweaver was still rocking table layouts until the MX 2004 release. Dreamweaver 4 and MX definitely focused on table layouts. I seem to remember MX supporting CSS but the layout focused on tables.
hypertele-Xii 5y ago
Programming computers just is like that. You never, ever in any programming language get to say what you mean. You always, without exception, have to speak alien to the computer to get it to do what you want. Just different flavors of alien.
progmetaldev 5y ago
I remember taking over a website around 2007 that was built completely with tables. I was having a bit of a layout issue, and found many missing </td> and </tr> tags throughout the code. A ha! I'll go and fix everything and validate the HTML. The entire layout was built upon those missing tags, and once added in, everything fell apart much worse than before I had gone in and "fixed" everything.

by torh 5y ago

mjburgess 5y ago

If you think of a table as a discrete coordinate system then it's fairly obvious. You wanted to position things at specific coordinates, and have the browser take care of padding/flowing/etc. A table is a natural choice.

zozbot234 5y ago
That's what CSS Grid is for.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  CSS Grid was not released until many years later.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
At the time, there was serious rage against using table for layout. Everyone had to do it at some point if you wanted proper spacing of elements. Table was one of the only ways to do it and, as you say, a natural choice. But you could easily lose at a job interview if you were a proponent of this.
- goto11 5y ago
  There were always tradeoffs involved. A site might be legally required to be accessible, or it may be a business decision. Layouts hacked together with floats were a mess to create and maintain, but tended to adapt better to mobile displays. A competent front-end developer should understand pros and cons and be able to handle both approaches. Even today you might have to support old internet explorer, so you cant use display:grid. Of course incompetence can be present on either side of the table in interviews. I have heard about people avoiding display:table in CSS because they heard tables were bad.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Sure, I was there. cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUjDMdSwefk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUjDMdSwefk
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    How is that youtube link relevant?
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      I was making a humorous reference to the song, via the line "I was there", > To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin. I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties. > But I'm losing my edge. I'm losing my edge, but I was there. I was there. But I was there. It's a song which has a type of nostalgia analogous to the one in this thread.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  At this time it was a perfectly example of why CSS specialists and developers forced into using CSS were talking past each other. The purists insulted table layouts with good reason, but the best they could offer was crazy tricks with floats that made semantically as little sense as tables. Now that CSS grid is finally useable both sides can agree on a proper answer, but this is 20 years later. That's the thing about purists, they're not wrong in pointing out the problems, but they're often so obsessed with the problems they fail to critically evaluate the alternative solutions and realize they are also terrible.
goto11 5y ago
> If you think of a table as a discrete coordinate system then it's fairly obvious. Unfortunately tables did not work like a coordinate system, since cells would grow to accommodate their content. Combined with spacer gifs, tables could be used to generate whitespace padding and aligning content, but it was very tricky to use tables for exact positioning.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Ah, a discrete non-linear coordinate system :)
- torh 5y ago
  That 1x1 pixel space.gif was sure used a lot back in the days.

conradfr 5y ago

It didn't feel wrong but it was tedious. Especially when you wanted to do rounded corners, with tables and sliced images. At least it was/is easy to vertically center the content of the cell. Unlike divs, for reasons that still escape me. If you want to cash in on that table knowledge nowadays, just do email templates ;)

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
giantrobot 5y ago
> It didn't feel wrong but it was tedious. Every WYSIWYG HTML editor made it super easy to us...abuse tables for layouts. IIRC Dreamweaver was still rocking table layouts until the MX 2004 release. Dreamweaver 4 and MX definitely focused on table layouts. I seem to remember MX supporting CSS but the layout focused on tables.

hypertele-Xii 5y ago

Programming computers just is like that. You never, ever in any programming language get to say what you mean. You always, without exception, have to speak alien to the computer to get it to do what you want. Just different flavors of alien.

progmetaldev 5y ago

I remember taking over a website around 2007 that was built completely with tables. I was having a bit of a layout issue, and found many missing </td> and </tr> tags throughout the code. A ha! I'll go and fix everything and validate the HTML. The entire layout was built upon those missing tags, and once added in, everything fell apart much worse than before I had gone in and "fixed" everything.