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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Largely because I'm relatively new to all of this and probably don't know better, but I've found success just using divs for all layout and doing it myself.

Which is a smell to me, but I just can't help but find that every time I have consistent results and expected behaviour. Div and flexbox for everything.

It actually reminds me of another smell I have with django: write my own serializers and views rather than using any of the magical ones. I tried so hard to use the freebies but the moment you want something that isn't exactly as prescribed, it becomes a disaster. That's been my experience with CSS and HTML layouts.

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You're very lucky to be new to this! If you have success with div and flexbox for everything, then I'm guessing you're not supporting old IEs. You're lucky to have skipped the years of pain in which flexbox simply wasn't an option (for many devs that have to support IE it's still not).

But what's the current day scenario when you have to support old IEs? Security updates are only being provided for IE 11, which hopefully makes it default to the corporate sphere.

Other elements besides div just have a different default style. These default can be overridden in CSS. If you would like to start with a "blank slate" where all elements have the same defaults, you can use a CSS reset. There is really no good reason to not use the semantic elements when appropriate.

In terms of results, responsiveness, and flexibility, doing it with a div (or some other block-level element) and flexbox is the best way to do it. In terms of standards and tabular data, doing it with a table is probably more correct, but I think the benefits of flexbox outweighs any concerns about that.

>In terms of standards and tabular data, doing it with a table is probably more correct

I haven't tested it, but I assume you could fake the semantic part of a "CSS table" with something like `role=grid`

Yeah but why not just use HTML tables? It simpler and easier and more correct.

Because HTML table elements are treated differently by assistive technologies.

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