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I'm not sure they really "did the job ok", though I suppose it's easy to look back fondly on table layouts with rose-tinted spectacles, no doubt influenced by a

I'm not sure they really "did the job ok", though I suppose it's easy to look back fondly on table layouts with rose-tinted spectacles, no doubt influenced by a decade of messing about with floated layouts. As I recall, complex nested table layouts were horrendous to work with and could be very fragile. Perhaps their one great strength was that they were pretty consistent and had a very limited vernacular - once you understood the purpose of the elements TABLE, TR, TD, and perhaps THEAD and TBODY, and the attributes COLSPAN and ROWSPAN, well, that was it. Conceptually it was pretty easy to understand for anyone who'd used anything with rows and columns (eg. Excel).

jonahx 12y ago
They could be ugly and complex because of nesting, no doubt, but they at least provided a few fundamental layout concepts missing from CSS: easy vertical centering, and as you mentioned -- columns and rows. The great strengths you mention, consistency and conceptual simplicity, are absolutely paramount, and the fact is that the limited vernacular allowed you to accomplish 90+% of your layout needs, perhaps more -- all the simple things that have inspired and required hundreds of tutorials and hacks to accomplish in "pure" CSS [1]. Of course eventually we were given display:table, but even that was not as good as good-ol-table, because of the child-width-not-expanding-to-fill-parent issue mentioned in the article I linked to. [1] just as a for example: http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/ http://css-tricks.com/centering-in-the-unknown/