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Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

wiki.csswg.org

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Re: Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

#41

Post by zwnow »

cluckindan wrote: post #22
xboxnolifes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was advised a bit too early, but ever since flexbox entered the scene, tables for page formatting became irrelevant. And just in case, nobody ever said tables were dead. Tables were declared bad practice for page formatting, not for tabular data.

Do not use flexbox for page layout. It invites nested flexboxes, which eats your reflow performance. Use grid instead.

Flexbox is great and having nested flexboxes is also great. It makes building responsive pages a bliss. Learn it if you are having trouble with it, it is really not that difficult. Grids are much more error prone and allow for much less flexibility.

Re: Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

#42

Post by eviks »

afavour wrote: post #9
anonymars wrote: post #6

I will never understand the bizarre scene of the web's smug collective declaration that tables were dead and not to be used juxtaposed against the years it took to regain the ability to reliably center things. Assuming one agrees that we even did regain it. Related: I also love when I can't paste tabular data into Excel/etc. anymore For the record, I don't hate the idea of stylesheets, but...sheesh

Tables aren’t dead, they never were… when displaying tabular data. When it comes to layout I think you might be wearing rose tinted glasses. Remember having to put a 1px image in a table cell to avoid it disappearing? Remember “best viewed at 800x600”? I’m personally not nostalgic for either.

> Remember having to put a 1px image in a table cell to avoid it disappearing

Isn't this a trivial problem to solve that doesn't require introducing any new layout mechanisms?

Re: Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

#46

Post by wk_end »

dekoidal wrote: post #31
twsted wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Useful insight: any sources?

From 2014 https://jakearchibald.com/2014/dont-use-flexbox-for-page-lay...

Browser performance tips from 2014 mean very little twelve years on. Not only have machines gotten faster and networks gotten faster, rendering engines gotten faster. And I'm doubtful it nested flexboxes would've been all that much of a problem in most cases even then.

The most important thing is to use the right tool for the job. If grid lets you express what you want in the most straightforward way, use it; if flexbox does - even if it needs nesting - then use it instead. Don't shoehorn one into a situation where the other makes more sense. And sometimes either will work for a particular situation and that's fine too; use whatever you find most ergonomic. They're both very good in their own way.

Re: Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

#47

Post by 6510 »

anonymars wrote: post #6

I will never understand the bizarre scene of the web's smug collective declaration that tables were dead and not to be used juxtaposed against the years it took to regain the ability to reliably center things. Assuming one agrees that we even did regain it. Related: I also love when I can't paste tabular data into Excel/etc. anymore For the record, I don't hate the idea of stylesheets, but...sheesh

I try to politely debate the proponents with each hype cycle giving them the benefit of the doubt. They lost the "lets get rid of tables" debate quite miserably. I would quickly slap something together in jsfiddle, they would try recreate it. Adding some col- and/or rowspan programmatically for cells with the same value. Give an rgba color to rows and nth cells (columns). Resizing columns by size of cell content. It took tons of ugly css to replicate. Pasting the table into a wysiwyg editor is something they can never hope to re-create.

Usually I declare victory when they say that tables might get depreciated in the future.

They at one point really wanted to get rid of framesets. I asked how to make the classic scrollable resizable side top bottom UI in pure CSS. We've tried for hours, everything we tried looked ugly and didn't fully work. framesets are here to stay now :)

I still have one of the funnier "how to make this without tables?" challenges. It's not a very good example of the use of tables but did make me laugh.

https://go-here.nl/omg-tables.html

Re: Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

#48

Post by Popeyes »

tobr wrote: post #39
afavour wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tables aren’t dead, they never were… when displaying tabular data. When it comes to layout I think you might be wearing rose tinted glasses. Remember having to put a 1px image in a table cell to avoid it disappearing? Remember “best viewed at 800x600”? I’m personally not nostalgic for either.

For what it’s worth, the very page we’re on here still uses tables and spacer gifs, in 2025. (EDIT: I don’t mean to imply that this is good, just an inescapable observation in this context)

Probably why there are endless reworkings of the site.

Re: Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

#49

Post by yread »

I don't understand the point about comments. Why shouldn't they be allowed? What object model?

>Comments shouldn't have been allowed basically everywhere in CSS (compare to HTML, which basically only allows them where content goes), because it makes them basically unrepresentable in the object model, which in turn makes building editing directly on top of the object model impossible

Re: Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

#50

Post by Izkata »

> Absolutely-positioned replaced elements should stretch when opposite offset properties (e.g. left+right) are set, instead of being start-aligned.

They do with left+right, and have done this for a very long time. You only get the anchoring if you additionally set width.

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