I still use plain old tables in 2017.
Number of unhappy customers: 0
CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
31–40 of 280 posts
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#32Makes you wonder why HN won't budge with those tags in the source code. One day I hope to see "Table layouts are back with tags" and the HN programmers would have saved themselves so much work.
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#33So basically 15 years late, CSS finally solves this problem. And coming to CSS in 15 years: adaptive design!
Thirty year cycle, seems about the right interval for moving bones around in the graveyard, as traditional in all kinds of fashion and research.
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#34Makes you wonder why HN won't budge with those tags in the source code. One day I hope to see "Table layouts are back with tags" and the HN programmers would have saved themselves so much work.
Would there be a benefit to changing from to something else, if works just fine for the purpose?
If it ain't broke, right?
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#35This is excellent. And with the fast pace of browsers, and the improved habits of users (or automatic updates), it should be available for 95%+ of users within a year (It's in the current Safari Technology Preview, so Safari should get it with the next macOS point update).
This is also a good moment to remind people that you don't need Bootstrap and the like as much as you used to. Grids were 90% or the reason people started using these frameworks, and CSS (already with flexbox I'd argue, but definitely with grids) has caught up and is now easier to use and more flexible than any framework was.
It's also time to reconsider the atrocity that is class="col_xs_12". I've never undestood why people would lynch anyone using style="..." but happily littered their code with those grid classes. With the invention of sass at the latest, actual semantic class names should have once again become the only acceptable best practice. With html5, there's also a range of semantic tags[0], and using them improves both code readability, as well as allowing all sorts of new ideas in clients (not just browsers, but also text-to-speech and other accessabiity tools, or spiders, or brosers on new device classes)
o:
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#36So basically 15 years late, CSS finally solves this problem. And coming to CSS in 15 years: adaptive design!
Thirty year cycle, seems about the right interval for moving bones around in the graveyard, as traditional in all kinds of fashion and research.
It's generational. 30 years is enough for one generation to be replaced in whatever industry. And so we forget.
Same in politics, war, fashion, tech, research, literature, art, music.
Just keep those 'skinny jeans' in the back of the closet for New Years Eve 2045 ...
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#37Why is this problem so hard when CSS does so much for node positioning? Why not create a simpler standard once and for all?
The problem is so hard because it's not decomposed in a right way. It would be much simpler if there were 1) a pure drawing language like PostScript, very well researched and developed, 2) content, described purely in its own terms, and 3) a way to transform that content so it can be rendered by (1) on screen. This was the idea behind XML+XSLT, as far as I perceive it. CSS is kind of similar to XSLT in its pattern matching capabilities, but is both more complicated and way less powerful.
To compare things: Knuth's TeX has very few basic primitives: boxes, lists, and glue. And it produces very sophisticated layouts. CSS has a wagon of stuff and still cannot produce very basic things. I sometimes remember the old Ventura Publisher software (in 1990 I worked with version 3 of it). It was somewhat similar to the current HTML+CSS: you could have the same source text, but separate style files that would render it very differently for different purposes. 27 years ago.
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#38If we all had something like Display Postscript, this layout thingamajig would be delegated to libraries, and we wouldn't have to ask the browser deities to bestow new gifts upon us. Good adaptive layout would be closer to a new version of jquery and less Windows XP Service Pack 51.0.2b. (We also would have more sites that looked liked late 90s Flash, but then again, we're moving that direction anyway, just with more…
What would be the advantage over SVG ?
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#39Makes you wonder why HN won't budge with those tags in the source code. One day I hope to see "Table layouts are back with tags" and the HN programmers would have saved themselves so much work.
What, exactly, is the problem with the tag in the first place? Been a long, long time since I last touched HTML
Re: CSS Grid – Table layout is back. Be there and be square
#40If we all had something like Display Postscript, this layout thingamajig would be delegated to libraries, and we wouldn't have to ask the browser deities to bestow new gifts upon us. Good adaptive layout would be closer to a new version of jquery and less Windows XP Service Pack 51.0.2b. (We also would have more sites that looked liked late 90s Flash, but then again, we're moving that direction anyway, just with more…
While that would probably work fine for display and layout, but it doesn't work so well with the semantic document model that the web is built on. For example accessibility would suffer greatly unless every "jquery" (using your analogy) out there were to implement its own accessibility. (That's not to say things are absolutely peachy wrt. accessibility these days, but they'd get a lot worse if everybody had to implement their own.)