Wired.com made (web) history by being one of the first major sites to deploy a pure-CSS design, which was based on floats because that's all that worked back in

Wired.com made (web) history by being one of the first major sites to deploy a pure-CSS design, which was based on floats because that's all that worked back in the days of Netscape 4 and IE 4. The web design community now primarily uses floats for multi-column design because of its historical browser support. However if you don't need to support IE7 and lower, floats are one tool among many for multi-col layout, and not necessarily the best. Flexbox will only add another tool to that toolbox.