4 ms·

Why did we move away from this model of web development? If I remember back that far, it seems like fairly soon after this was when the meta starting telling us

Why did we move away from this model of web development? If I remember back that far, it seems like fairly soon after this was when the meta starting telling us that frames were bad, and using <table> was bad, etc. It all honestly seemed a lot easier than what has come after.

cartoffal 2y ago
It wasn't easier, but it was simpler. Fewer moving parts. The reason we moved away from it was that after a point, the amount of legwork to implement relatively simple behaviours became astronomical. Whether or not the current state of matters is "better", who's to say. But things are certainly much easier now. Besides, you still can use those old modes if you want to :)
mananaysiempre 2y ago
I have to use, still, a set of documentation that is formatted using an old-style two-frame layout—contents/search on the left, article on the right. It sucks, because unless I’m willing to lose the left frame, I can’t open articles in new tabs, I can’t bookmark them, I can’t copy their addresses. The back button kind of works, but the menu items are useless (they all contain the title of the frameset). And so on. The layouts people were trying to create with frames weren’t bad, but browser behaviour around framesets isn’t good. I didn’t really have a good enough Internet connection at the time, but looking at them now I do agree that frames break linking too hard and shouldn’t be used.
wavemode 2y ago
The direct answer to your question is that the idea of "responsive" web design gradually took over when smartphones became popular. People liked the idea of not needing to create a separate mobile version of their frontend, and instead simply adjusting the styling and structure of the page in response to the size of the viewport. Tables were bad at this because you couldn't use CSS to arbitrarily move around the way a table is structured. (The funny thing is that, in modern browsers this is no longer true - you actually can use CSS to restructure table layouts now. But, the world has already moved on.) Though there's a broader answer, which is that generally as web design has modernized, so too have ideas of "semantic" markup. Semantically, table is supposed to be used to display data. HTML which is used for its proper semantic purpose is easier for screen readers, improving accessibility, and easier for search crawlers to make sense of the content, improving SEO. So a lot of old HTML tricks fell out of use when HTML5 started becoming popular.
- jayflux 2y ago
  > The direct answer to your question is that the idea of "responsive" web design gradually took over when smartphones became popular. People liked the idea of not needing to create a separate mobile version of their frontend, and instead simply adjusting the styling and structure of the page in response to the size of the viewport. Table-based layout was already falling out of favour before this happened. Even when you had fixed sites that were predominantly desktop, divs and spans (coupled with CSS) made life a lot easier to put things where you wanted them and lay out a site faster. It was also cleaner when reading the markup. From what I remember, the move away from tables happened around the same time external CSS took off and you could partition your site with reusable styling instead of framesets or tables. Responsive design then sped up the process a few years later.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - wavemode 2y ago
    "Made life a lot easier" wasn't my experience. I always found early CSS much more fiddly than tables, and less capable in many ways. It's funny looking back at this SO question from 2009, and its answers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426253/why-use-tables-to-structure-your-layout https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426253/why-use-tables-to... There was definitely an ongoing culture war between people who felt like using tables was not "proper", and people who just wanted their site layout to work consistently in IE6.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
acjohnson55 2y ago
We moved away from it because frames are quite limited in what UI's they can express. I don't know that it's true that what we have now is much more complicated, because it's pretty simple to build a multi-pane layout with CSS grid or flexbox. I think frames are an artifact of the time when people thought of HTML as a desktop publishing markup language. It has evolved into a generalized UI description language.
bazoom42 2y ago
Framesets were a bad idea because they didn’t work well with links, bookmarks, and search engines. Tables are fine when used correctly though.
junto 2y ago
Tables didn’t work very well with screen readers if memory serves me right. That and it produced a tag soup. Ironically people moved to divs and spans, which when combined with the old box model issues, made the problem even worse. The semantic web elements in HTML5 was an attempt to fix those issues.

cartoffal 2y ago

It wasn't easier, but it was simpler. Fewer moving parts. The reason we moved away from it was that after a point, the amount of legwork to implement relatively simple behaviours became astronomical. Whether or not the current state of matters is "better", who's to say. But things are certainly much easier now. Besides, you still can use those old modes if you want to :)

mananaysiempre 2y ago

I have to use, still, a set of documentation that is formatted using an old-style two-frame layout—contents/search on the left, article on the right. It sucks, because unless I’m willing to lose the left frame, I can’t open articles in new tabs, I can’t bookmark them, I can’t copy their addresses. The back button kind of works, but the menu items are useless (they all contain the title of the frameset). And so on. The layouts people were trying to create with frames weren’t bad, but browser behaviour around framesets isn’t good. I didn’t really have a good enough Internet connection at the time, but looking at them now I do agree that frames break linking too hard and shouldn’t be used.

wavemode 2y ago

The direct answer to your question is that the idea of "responsive" web design gradually took over when smartphones became popular. People liked the idea of not needing to create a separate mobile version of their frontend, and instead simply adjusting the styling and structure of the page in response to the size of the viewport. Tables were bad at this because you couldn't use CSS to arbitrarily move around the way a table is structured. (The funny thing is that, in modern browsers this is no longer true - you actually can use CSS to restructure table layouts now. But, the world has already moved on.) Though there's a broader answer, which is that generally as web design has modernized, so too have ideas of "semantic" markup. Semantically, table is supposed to be used to display data. HTML which is used for its proper semantic purpose is easier for screen readers, improving accessibility, and easier for search crawlers to make sense of the content, improving SEO. So a lot of old HTML tricks fell out of use when HTML5 started becoming popular.

jayflux 2y ago
> The direct answer to your question is that the idea of "responsive" web design gradually took over when smartphones became popular. People liked the idea of not needing to create a separate mobile version of their frontend, and instead simply adjusting the styling and structure of the page in response to the size of the viewport. Table-based layout was already falling out of favour before this happened. Even when you had fixed sites that were predominantly desktop, divs and spans (coupled with CSS) made life a lot easier to put things where you wanted them and lay out a site faster. It was also cleaner when reading the markup. From what I remember, the move away from tables happened around the same time external CSS took off and you could partition your site with reusable styling instead of framesets or tables. Responsive design then sped up the process a few years later.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- wavemode 2y ago
  "Made life a lot easier" wasn't my experience. I always found early CSS much more fiddly than tables, and less capable in many ways. It's funny looking back at this SO question from 2009, and its answers: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426253/why-use-tables-to-structure-your-layout https://stackoverflow.com/questions/426253/why-use-tables-to... There was definitely an ongoing culture war between people who felt like using tables was not "proper", and people who just wanted their site layout to work consistently in IE6.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

acjohnson55 2y ago

We moved away from it because frames are quite limited in what UI's they can express. I don't know that it's true that what we have now is much more complicated, because it's pretty simple to build a multi-pane layout with CSS grid or flexbox. I think frames are an artifact of the time when people thought of HTML as a desktop publishing markup language. It has evolved into a generalized UI description language.

bazoom42 2y ago

Framesets were a bad idea because they didn’t work well with links, bookmarks, and search engines. Tables are fine when used correctly though.

junto 2y ago

Tables didn’t work very well with screen readers if memory serves me right. That and it produced a tag soup. Ironically people moved to divs and spans, which when combined with the old box model issues, made the problem even worse. The semantic web elements in HTML5 was an attempt to fix those issues.