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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of back in 1997 (maybe 98, anyway long time ago), I had been on a JavaScript course with a British guy, and went over to his house. He showed me the little cv site he'd been working on, it had quite a nice design, much better than I would ever do if asked to design something. I looked at the code - it was all tables, so I decided to show him CSS at the end of which he thunderously proclaimed "That's what's wrong with this industry, there's always something new to learn!"

I think he's doing something with Sitecore now, make of that what you will.

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The funny thing is, we've just been finding more and more complicated ways to make table-based layouts ever since, but they're better because they are CSS based? I dunno, I don't have to squint hard at CSS-Grid to see old table layouts peeking back at me.

It could also have to do with no longer requiring, say, a 1x1 invisible pixel...

With HTML Tables, it's easy to switch on the grid (border=1) and see what's really going on. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but WYSIWYG sure the hell made life easier. Unless you are a dedicated UI specialist, you'll probably spend way too much time dinkering with the web UI because it's not WYSIWYG. It's like trying to park an 18-wheeler truck in a normal lot: you can't just "go there"; you have to plan it all out in 7 steps and hope it all works. Bicycle science is now rocket science. I'd like scientific proof "it must be this way" to get whatever wonderful benefit non-WYSIWYG has. Device size handling? Make 2 UI's: fat and skinny; that's easier than parking the 18-wheeler.

> With HTML Tables, it's easy to switch on the grid (border=1) and see what's really going on.

With CSS it's actually easy to display the grid `\*{border=1;}`. With tables, you have a lot of them, and must go into each line of your page adding that clause.

Nah you can target both with css (I.e. use table td selector to target all cells)

Then you border-tize all div's. That's messy. I suppose one could write jQuery to filter certain divs, but it's not a universal solution.

I think he kind of had a good point. It would be nice to have a single set of tools that can always get the job done no matter what.

yes that would be nice, but then lots of things that do not match reality would be nice.

The second step to making things better is to believe they can and should be improved.

The first step is knowing that the current state of things is deficient in some way.

I think the should be improved is implicit in the first step, does can be improved imply a suggestion - if not the third step is a suggestion, and it's that third step I'm always seeing problems in, not to mention the third step in a scenario of too much too learn runs into the XKCD standards problem https://xkcd.com/927/

Not long ago I had to write some JS (had to, not wanted to) to do something on a site, and got something working based on what I knew, only to be derided by a "real JS developer" that my code was "deprecated", "not following best practices", "not modern", etc.

He gave me his version which was around 10x more code and only worked in a subset of the latest browsers, while mine not only did but would probably work in everything since maybe IE5 or so...

Maybe that's considered a bug, but I don't want any of this trend-chasing. I write code to get things done. My users don't care, and they want to get things done too.

Sounds like he wasn’t a very good JS dev...?

if someone ended up with 10X the code using 'modern' JS and it did not work cross-browser while yours worked cross-browser including IE6 and up, then I strongly suspect I would prefer yours.

If his ES6 required 10x more code than your ES5, then he doesn't actually know ES6.

I think he probably doesn't know JavaScript at that point. I remember I got invited to an interview one time and they were impressed by my code for their coding assignment partially because it could print out in less than a page (no minification), and they referred to another applicant whose code had taken 6 pages. And I was just like - how could it take that much code?

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