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> It's taken all this time for CSS to catch up with table-based layouts CSS supported table-based layouts since CSS 2.0 which is more than 20 years old at this

by goto11 5y ago

> It's taken all this time for CSS to catch up with table-based layouts CSS supported table-based layouts since CSS 2.0 which is more than 20 years old at this point. See: https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-CSS2-20080411/tables.html https://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-CSS2-20080411/tables.html If you are referring to grid, this is much more powerful than table, for example it decouples the visual order from the structural order.

lmm 5y ago
> CSS supported table-based layouts since CSS 2.0 which is more than 20 years old at this point. IE only supported them from v8, so more like 10 years old in practice (a lot of CSS 2.x was "standardised" before it was implemented, and some of it turned out to not even be possible to implement). Though I was actually thinking of flexbox rather than table-layout, though I don't remember what (if any) the difference was.
- goto11 5y ago
  Yeah IE6 being abandonware held back the web for a decade, no doubt about that. But it was not CSS that had trouble catching up, it was a deliberate strategy by Microsoft because they considered the web a threat to its desktop dominance.
strenholme 5y ago
Sure, the CSS standard supported CSS tables since the IE6 days, but IE6 didn’t support CSS tables. It wasn’t until IE8 had a decent browser share, around 2011, that it was feasible to use CSS tables. Even here, there were still enough IE6 and IE7 users that I still had stuff like this on my website in 2011:  There was a huge disconnect between what the standards documents supported and what browsers actually supported. There’s a reason they made that “smiley face” Acid2 test in the mid-2000s, because standards support was so bad back then: http://acid2.acidtests.org/ http://acid2.acidtests.org/ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2
- goto11 5y ago
  Yeah IE6 held back the web for a long time, no question.

by goto11 5y ago

lmm 5y ago

> CSS supported table-based layouts since CSS 2.0 which is more than 20 years old at this point. IE only supported them from v8, so more like 10 years old in practice (a lot of CSS 2.x was "standardised" before it was implemented, and some of it turned out to not even be possible to implement). Though I was actually thinking of flexbox rather than table-layout, though I don't remember what (if any) the difference was.

goto11 5y ago
Yeah IE6 being abandonware held back the web for a decade, no doubt about that. But it was not CSS that had trouble catching up, it was a deliberate strategy by Microsoft because they considered the web a threat to its desktop dominance.

strenholme 5y ago

Sure, the CSS standard supported CSS tables since the IE6 days, but IE6 didn’t support CSS tables. It wasn’t until IE8 had a decent browser share, around 2011, that it was feasible to use CSS tables. Even here, there were still enough IE6 and IE7 users that I still had stuff like this on my website in 2011:  There was a huge disconnect between what the standards documents supported and what browsers actually supported. There’s a reason they made that “smiley face” Acid2 test in the mid-2000s, because standards support was so bad back then: http://acid2.acidtests.org/ http://acid2.acidtests.org/ — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2

goto11 5y ago
Yeah IE6 held back the web for a long time, no question.