Pills: A simple responsive CSS grid for humans

Post by YngwieMalware » Tue, Jun 07, 2016, 12:34 PM UTC

ams6110 wrote: post #94

icedchai wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! It's sad that table-based layouts became "bad practice". Generally they're a lot simpler to understand than the mess of CSS and bizarrely named divs we have today.

I think part of the reason tables became considered "bad" was that back at that time most web pages were built by interspersed HTML and ASP or PHP code and getting all the TR and TD tags balanced especially with rowspans or colspans thrown in quickly became a mess. Every page was a standalone thing also, it was much less common to see templating systems used to establish the overall structure of the site. So if you e…

Yeah a huge part of this too was, for whatever reason, old search engines not being able to index what was inside of tables. I imagine it's not even like that anymore.

Post by kenbellows » Mon, Jun 13, 2016, 8:43 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #92

MawNicker wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> very very long time. It's sad really. Table-based layouts have been considered bad practice for years but CSS is only just now becoming a superset. That is if you're lucky enough to be free of old browsers. If you want everything to "just work" tables are still the practical choice to this day . Kudos to PG for sticking to what he learned in the 90's when he built HN.

Yes! It's sad that table-based layouts became "bad practice". Generally they're a lot simpler to understand than the mess of CSS and bizarrely named divs we have today.

An important reason that table based layouts became obsolete in HTML is because the way table cells are rendered is not the same as how `div`s are rendered. It's shockingly difficult to get a table cell to keep a consistent size. This makes some sense if you're using it as a simple data container, but doesn't work at all if you're trying to use it as a generic content container the way we use `div`s

Also, if by "bizarrely named divs" you mean things like "section", "article", "header", "footer", etc., I have to disagree; I think these are a huge improvement in terms of readability and allowing a developer to communicate the intended purpose and structure of the code, and they offer significant advantages in accessibility as well. You ask me, the semantic web is a wonderful thing

Re: Pills: A simple responsive CSS grid for humans

Re: Pills: A simple responsive CSS grid for humans