Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcphage | Hacker News Reader

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> back then, it sucked so hard that web designers with a decade of experience would crank out articles about trying to achieve "the Holy Grail of web design," which was three columns, a header, and a footer, with stuff in the middle bit and links in the left bit and maybe some other links in the right bit, that didn't fuck up in some hilarious or obscure way. Shit that was trivial and intuitive with tables, but absolutely fucking impossible with CSS.

This fact (which is 100% true) makes me so angry about CSS. They had a really good idea—separate structure from content. But they didn't design CSS about what people Actually Wanted To Do, so for what, a decade plus? CSS was this steaming pile of hacks and hoops and bullshit. Designers wanted 3-column layouts. They wanted pinstriping. They wanted drop shadows. They wanted to center things vertically. And rather than make those dead simple, they made them all pains in the ass. Why spend all that time designing and developing and proselyting a technology, without ever thinking about what sort of thing people will want to do with it?

They did, in fact, design CSS to implement this kind of design easily. You were able to implement that in a simple way without any weird hacks using only the functionality in CSS 2.0, published in 1998.

Unfortunately, the simple way was to use display: table-cell, and Microsoft didn’t implement that part of the standard until Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009. And since old browser versions stuck around longer back in those days, it was several years after that before web developers could count on it.

If it weren’t for Microsoft abandoning Internet Explorer development for five entire years once they got a browser monopoly, you could’ve been doing this in a much simpler way more than a decade sooner.

You’re blaming the W3C for not putting an easy way to do it into the standard but they did put it into the standard. It’s just what they put into the standard didn’t matter – Internet Explorer had >90% market share so Microsoft didn’t care about the standards and paralysed the industry for over a decade.

A truly vast amount of the weird hacks we had to do back then was simply papering over the shortcomings of Internet Explorer.

CSS was the worst part of the HTML/CSS/JS combo. It was easier to build layouts with tables, 1995 style, for a very long time.

I have heard that web design is supposed to be tractable again, but I could not stand CSS with all its spooky-action-at-a-distance unpredictability, and did not have the years of patience it would have taken to get through the growing pains, so I haven't had anything to do with web work in over twenty years now. Oh, well! It was fun in the late '90s, at least.

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