Rethinking DOM from first principles

Post by jitl » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 2:35 PM UTC

benoau wrote: post #75

7bit wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As for the vertical centering, trying this 20 years ago, it was a pain in the ass. These and layouting in general got massively simplified in the past 20 years. Remember that back then, everything was cramped into tables? I do. So if someone tells me, "DOM, HTML and CSS is becoming more and more difficult" just tells me to ignore their amateurish and unfounded opinion... Hah!

20 years ago it was much easier, you could ethically use tables for layouts which semantically did not make much sense, but in terms of code structure it was very simple: this table is the full size of the page, this cell is the header with this height, this cell is the sidebar with this width, this cell occupies the rest of the space with content positioned in the middle, all expressible without any styling at all.

Post by benoau » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 2:44 PM UTC

jitl wrote: post #82

benoau wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago it was much easier, you could ethically use tables for layouts which semantically did not make much sense, but in terms of code structure it was very simple: this table is the full size of the page, this cell is the header with this height, this cell is the sidebar with this width, this cell occupies the rest of the space with content positioned in the middle, all expressible without any styling at all.

You can still do this if you want, table element still exists and works the same way.

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 3:07 PM UTC

benoau wrote: post #83

corytheboyd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds crazy to me, the flex system is exactly this but also semantically correct. You can’t possibly be telling me that table hacks of yore are easier than this, a clearly designed system for the actual problem you want to solve https://css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/css-flexbo... I’m not at all a frontend person, I just think flex is one of the best systems I have ever used. It usually gets the job…

Flex is great but tables are also a natural solution for anything grid-based, which of course layouts almost always are. The whole internet used to do stuff like this before the structural flow of content became important: header sidebar content

Post by suprfsat » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 3:12 PM UTC

hungryhobbit wrote: post #85

All those words, and yet not once did he even mention the entire reason everything is the way it is: to preserve backwards compatibility. It's like writing an entire diatribe about how it sucks that people can insult you online, and how that should change ... and not even mentioning the benefits of freedom of speech.

Post by graemep » Wed, Aug 06, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC

ezst wrote: post #42

strogonoff wrote: post #29

People often lament how DOM, HTML and CSS are becoming more and more complicated: the difficulty with simple and/or common tasks like vertical centering or virtualization, 600+ CSS properties, so many JavaScript methods, leaky abstractions, { contain: size }. I agree on many issues, but equally I struggle to imagine how it could realistically be not complex. If it was a result of a single very well thought through vi…

> I struggle to imagine how it could realistically be not complex. Pretty easy, we should have had 2 standards, one being "Web for applications", built on a VM, stdlib, bytecode, RPC, UI framework and standard library of controls, ... And "Web for web pages" which was a solved problem pre-HTML5 days. Java and Flash (although very problematic from a security point of view) were probably better bases on which to build…