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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

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.
- jandrese 5y ago
  This exactly. CSS proponents were badmouthing tables left and right, but tables excelled at the kind of layouts that CSS struggled with. Reactive three column website with tables? Super easy. Reactive three column layout with CSS? Requires a human sacrifice and won't work in half of the browsers of the time. Want the text centered in the column headings? In tables it was a built in feature. With CSS, well, I hope you like pain. These weren't obscure problems either. Many websites were already in a 3 column layout because it was so natural with tables, so converting them over to CSS was an immediate pain point. That said, if you wanted to do something more complicated then tables could fall apart pretty quickly whereas CSS had a solution. Adding columns to a table when someone expanded their window and reflowing the content into the new columns was basically not possible with tables, but is something CSS can handle for example. Most people only had simple problems though and CSS complicated their life considerably.

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.

jandrese 5y ago
This exactly. CSS proponents were badmouthing tables left and right, but tables excelled at the kind of layouts that CSS struggled with. Reactive three column website with tables? Super easy. Reactive three column layout with CSS? Requires a human sacrifice and won't work in half of the browsers of the time. Want the text centered in the column headings? In tables it was a built in feature. With CSS, well, I hope you like pain. These weren't obscure problems either. Many websites were already in a 3 column layout because it was so natural with tables, so converting them over to CSS was an immediate pain point. That said, if you wanted to do something more complicated then tables could fall apart pretty quickly whereas CSS had a solution. Adding columns to a table when someone expanded their window and reflowing the content into the new columns was basically not possible with tables, but is something CSS can handle for example. Most people only had simple problems though and CSS complicated their life considerably.