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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

HTML table tags, baby! Thank you!

http://www.flownet.com/ron/css-rant.html

I've never read this before, but it offers a unique perspective that might have convinced me to be less damning of tables in place of CSS.

Well hey, you could always get the best of both worlds and use "display: table" and friends. :)

I never understood the point of this... If you want something to look like a table, why not just use a table? With html only content and design really matter...

User agents aren't necessarily graphical web browsers. Marking up a document fragment as a <table> when it isn't tabular data makes it harder for screen readers, terminal web browsers, and crawlers to do their job well.

Personally I went full circle on the issue. I did table layouts when I was a kid, then I learned the "right way" and fought great battles to make CSS behave. Then, after I did a bit of that stuff and saw others doing it, it dawned upon me that the whole "separating layout from content" is just a religious dogma, and like the best religious dogmas, those loudest about it are least likely to actually try and follow it. We've replaced clean tables with an ungodly mess of divs, which are placed in our HTML for the sole reason to provide CSS hooks - there's no semantic reason for them. This is not separating presentation from content, this is shitting presentation at content through a high-speed fan!

So nowadays, I look more favorably at tables again.

Flexbox solves many of my css layout woes, but is still not as convenient as it could be (and is still "container" based as the article puts it).

I wish I could use something like QML for layout (anchors that connect elements to each other, grids for when you need lists/tables/columns/grids).

While that made good points back when it was written (2009), nowadays we have flexbox - which solves the problems that essay describes with such precision it makes you wonder if the spec authors were responding to it in particular. I mean, if you take, say, MDN's tutorial page on flexbox, it demonstrates the exact same layout that used to be such a problem:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Flexibl...

So perhaps the story is, more precisely, "when it comes to layout, abusing floats is fundamentally flawed" - yes, in the past, tables may have been the best alternative in a lot of cases; but now we've got it, flexbox is superior to floats and to tables. It really is a joy to work with once you get your head round it IMO.

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