8 ms·

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

by Kudos 4mo ago

JimDabell 4mo ago
It became feasible to switch to CSS layouts for complex websites and apps in the early 00s. How early depended upon your target demographics and skill set. Lots of people who didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things carried on using table layouts long after browser support demanded it. I was using CSS sparingly from 1999 onwards and ditched table layouts in 2002, but I was ahead of the curve.
- yesbabyyes 4mo ago
  Same here, we resigned our site in early 2003 with CSS layout. Late adopters would snicker a bit back then, seeing it as chasing a fad or being too hipster. Out of all similar situations, where I may have been an early adopter of a technology or method for reasons, using the web platform and following standards has probably been the one I least regret.
GaryBluto 4mo ago
It worked for the most part.
goalieca 4mo ago
Yes and no. ie6 couldn’t render anything near the full specification so tables and other tricks were used where css couldn’t cut it. I’d still that that over JavaScript “apps”
EE84M3i 4mo ago
Still works fine for this site.
marginalia_nu 4mo ago
Table designs were kinda brilliant though, both in how easy they were to create[1], but also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Given context of the table in front of you, you can generally piece together where on the screen the information goes without rendering anything. You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and the layout information is generally in the CSS file rather than the document itself making parsing the layout a Hard problem demanding the implementation of a partial CSS engine (and a sometimes JS engine too). [1] A totally viable workflow was to draw your website in something like photoshop, cut boxes where the content would go, and then export it to an HTML table.
- jfengel 4mo ago
  also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Or even a regular expression.
  - Hunpeter 4mo ago
    But what if Tony the Pony comes?
- xp84 4mo ago
  Re: photoshop html table export Marketing email is still produced in this exact same way at some companies - ask me how I know! (If anyone isn’t familiar with this, it’s because for security reasons we’ve all decided email should use an intentionally gimped de facto (non-)standard which only supports a few little dabs of CSS - 90% of email is formatted with strictly 90s technology. And by “we” I mean that’s what Google and MS allow in their clients, so it’s very pointless to try to go beyond that given their combined usage share.
woodpanel 4mo ago
3 by 3 iframe layout with the center one displaying the actual content.
neya 4mo ago
That's funny because the argument against tables was always that they added extra markup a.k.a lines of code, only to replace them with dozens of nested divs, half assed CSS layout ideologies (floats and clear's, for example) and barely functional JS that all somehow needed to work in sync which was almost never. That's how NPM was born. Tables worked with 100% of the browsers. The alternatives needed polyfills and shims and ironically the whole thing needed easily 2x the number of integration time and lines of code compared to just slapping tables.
- Kudos 4mo ago
  The argument was for markup to have semantic meaning, not number of lines. Also, NPM was not born for browser JS.
  - neya 4mo ago
    No, npm ultimately enabled the exact kind of accidental complexity I'm talking about where you need a massive node_modules folder and Babel just to generate client-side code
- xp84 4mo ago
  There will always be a tension between those who want purely semantic documents and those who argue for a pragmatic allowance of layout to just be allowed in the document itself. It’s indisputable though that the modern BS of frontend tech is approaching an asymptote of ridiculous complexity. The divs go so deep that it is often pointless to even try to determine what’s going on from a web inspector. And I think the documents themselves are now less semantic than they ever were. Sure, tables were abused (to the extent they weren’t anything close to tabular data). But today every element you see being a layer of 37 divs and spans that don’t even function or in some cases even render without JavaScript getting involved… the web is now just basically a responsive version of PDF.
  - user3939382 4mo ago
    View Source on any major modern website and many (most?) others is useless. You get 15 lines with some cryptic webpacked JS references. It must be that we now have a new generation of devs that have no experience with the beauty of the original web where others’ pages were legible and you could as a human easily read and learn from their source. I’m not saying there are 0 tradeoffs but there’s definitely a loss there.
rimliu 4mo ago
https://csszengarden.com/ https://csszengarden.com/ - born in 2000s
lenkite 4mo ago
And today tailwindcss misuses the class attribute to add a gazillion classes that make your eyes bleed. By the time you reach the end of the list, you have grown a beard.

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

by Kudos 4mo ago

In the 2000s wasn't everything just misused/abused table layouts? Maybe we frequented different places, but that's how I remember it.

JimDabell 4mo ago

It became feasible to switch to CSS layouts for complex websites and apps in the early 00s. How early depended upon your target demographics and skill set. Lots of people who didn’t want to learn new ways of doing things carried on using table layouts long after browser support demanded it. I was using CSS sparingly from 1999 onwards and ditched table layouts in 2002, but I was ahead of the curve.

yesbabyyes 4mo ago
Same here, we resigned our site in early 2003 with CSS layout. Late adopters would snicker a bit back then, seeing it as chasing a fad or being too hipster. Out of all similar situations, where I may have been an early adopter of a technology or method for reasons, using the web platform and following standards has probably been the one I least regret.

GaryBluto 4mo ago

It worked for the most part.

goalieca 4mo ago

Yes and no. ie6 couldn’t render anything near the full specification so tables and other tricks were used where css couldn’t cut it. I’d still that that over JavaScript “apps”

EE84M3i 4mo ago

Still works fine for this site.

marginalia_nu 4mo ago

Table designs were kinda brilliant though, both in how easy they were to create[1], but also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Given context of the table in front of you, you can generally piece together where on the screen the information goes without rendering anything. You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and the layout information is generally in the CSS file rather than the document itself making parsing the layout a Hard problem demanding the implementation of a partial CSS engine (and a sometimes JS engine too). [1] A totally viable workflow was to draw your website in something like photoshop, cut boxes where the content would go, and then export it to an HTML table.

jfengel 4mo ago
also how easy they were to parse programatically or with a text-based browser. Or even a regular expression.
- Hunpeter 4mo ago
  But what if Tony the Pony comes?
xp84 4mo ago
Re: photoshop html table export Marketing email is still produced in this exact same way at some companies - ask me how I know! (If anyone isn’t familiar with this, it’s because for security reasons we’ve all decided email should use an intentionally gimped de facto (non-)standard which only supports a few little dabs of CSS - 90% of email is formatted with strictly 90s technology. And by “we” I mean that’s what Google and MS allow in their clients, so it’s very pointless to try to go beyond that given their combined usage share.

woodpanel 4mo ago

3 by 3 iframe layout with the center one displaying the actual content.

neya 4mo ago

That's funny because the argument against tables was always that they added extra markup a.k.a lines of code, only to replace them with dozens of nested divs, half assed CSS layout ideologies (floats and clear's, for example) and barely functional JS that all somehow needed to work in sync which was almost never. That's how NPM was born. Tables worked with 100% of the browsers. The alternatives needed polyfills and shims and ironically the whole thing needed easily 2x the number of integration time and lines of code compared to just slapping tables.

Kudos 4mo ago
The argument was for markup to have semantic meaning, not number of lines. Also, NPM was not born for browser JS.
- neya 4mo ago
  No, npm ultimately enabled the exact kind of accidental complexity I'm talking about where you need a massive node_modules folder and Babel just to generate client-side code
xp84 4mo ago
There will always be a tension between those who want purely semantic documents and those who argue for a pragmatic allowance of layout to just be allowed in the document itself. It’s indisputable though that the modern BS of frontend tech is approaching an asymptote of ridiculous complexity. The divs go so deep that it is often pointless to even try to determine what’s going on from a web inspector. And I think the documents themselves are now less semantic than they ever were. Sure, tables were abused (to the extent they weren’t anything close to tabular data). But today every element you see being a layer of 37 divs and spans that don’t even function or in some cases even render without JavaScript getting involved… the web is now just basically a responsive version of PDF.
- user3939382 4mo ago
  View Source on any major modern website and many (most?) others is useless. You get 15 lines with some cryptic webpacked JS references. It must be that we now have a new generation of devs that have no experience with the beauty of the original web where others’ pages were legible and you could as a human easily read and learn from their source. I’m not saying there are 0 tradeoffs but there’s definitely a loss there.

rimliu 4mo ago

https://csszengarden.com/ https://csszengarden.com/ - born in 2000s

lenkite 4mo ago

And today tailwindcss misuses the class attribute to add a gazillion classes that make your eyes bleed. By the time you reach the end of the list, you have grown a beard.