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Comment by chrisweekly | Hacker News Reader

Wonderful comment, bravo!

I think back to the early days (circa 2000 or so), before CSS positioning and float hacks were even a thing, working as the lead webdev at Upromise, meticulously hand-crafting complex layouts with nested HTML tables... you could nest them 5 or 6 levels deep before running into noticeable render performance issues in what must have been, what, IE4 and NN4? It really has been a couple decades, hasn't it. Kinda wish every FE dev had to follow the path the industry took to get where we are now...

/ramble

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Used to draw round corners [the biggest design trend request circa 2002] using tables with cells of one pixel, painting every cell mimicking a perfect anti-aliased curve in a photoshop rectangle, a mere 32 cell table per corner, lol.

That takes the cake. The worst I did was 9 cells, with images in each corner. How did you maintain your sanity when one cell went bonkers on it's dimensions for no good reason?

Your comment made me remember that every cell had a blank gif so the dimensions would be exact! Even found a wiki about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacer_GIF

Yep, an image was the only way to "guarantee" the cell displayed at a specific width/height. These are the kinds of things that taught me most hacks aren't worth doing.

ha, ah the memories. On my first web job (late 90s) my boss interviewed a guy who was bragging about one pixel borders around an element that were all background colored table cells. (each had to have an image in them to force the cell size, remember doing that?) I knew how to do this, but I said it just wasn't worth doing.

I think this is how web tech works best, when you see the best way coming down the pipe, don't waste time on hacks. But I admit, floating was the only way to make columns for far to long.

I know grid is taking a long time to take root. I primarily only use grid-template-columns, grid-gap and areas or really only needed for major/complicated layout.

Float?

Why not table with inline width=95%/align=center

Of course back in the day we all used tables, but there was a shift where "tables=bad" for layout, but we didn't have a good replacement yet... so it was floats.

float, with "faux columns" that I copied from a-list-apart for every new page I made.

There was a time when the only way to get nice 1px borders was to place your table inside the other table, set the outer table's cell to the color you wanted for your background and then set cellspacing on the inner table to 1px.

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