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Comment by hattmall | Hacker News Reader

I've never understood the hate for table layouts. They literally just make sense. And now all they advanced css frameworks have basically just recreated table layouts via divs with row and column classes. I get the need for responsive designs but I still think we could have gotten there with tables.

It's like people got mad that tables were being used to for something other than strictly tabular data, so they recreated the idea behind table as a layout tool with "css grid" and made it 50x more complicated.

I wish web design could follow like woodworking where the most focus is on using the base tools very effectively. The introduction of new tools is mostly frowned upon. Of course that's all because of the inherently dangerous nature of using power tools. Regardless of tech stack you aren't to likely to lose a finger from coding.

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The move from table layouts to divs+css was based on the idea that mixing markup and layout/styling was bad. Then a few years later as everyone moved to React et al. it was good again.

Sigh.

Yeah, a switch in mode between "make an XML document and then make something else to present it" (I think suffered massively from never actually being completely achievable with CSS, let alone comprehensible) and "just make a UI toolkit for javascript" (where in a full webapp world, the underlying documents are usually JSON and the presentation layer is javascript using HTML+CSS to talk to a layout and rendering engine).

I understand the sentiment, but disregarding the nuance does the situation a disservice. HTML/CSS serves two separate but related use cases: a document layout and display language, and as a display layer for applications. I remember Pete Hunt's talk "React: Rethinking best practices" [1] explaining in 2013 why the styling separation of concerns for document display doesn't make sense for applications. Has opinion on best practice se-sawed back and forth? No, we've merely gone from web content being document centered to being massively application centered, and the discourse on best practices follows that proportional shift.

Would it be better if there was a different web application display technology, not retrofitted on top of HTML/CSS? Like maybe, but HTML/CSS is... fine. Even separated from the success of Javascript, it's an archetypal example of "worse is better" [2] leading to market success.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7cQ3mrcKaY

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Layouts implemented with tables make sense when you need to place elements once, and not a ton of them at once. Making even slight changes to your tables within tables within tables is such a nightmare, that throwing out all of your code and starting from scratch might just be preferable. Tables are not a basic tool for this task, it's a severe misuse of the tooling, caused by a lack of alternatives at the time.

> I've never understood the hate for table layouts.

Then I would say you have never understood HTML. Using tables for layout conflates content/structure/semantics with presentation and this is a problem in general with the HTML standards prior to HTML4 Strict. The reasons why this is bad have been expounded upon for near thirty years and are well known. HTML tables are not a “base tool” for layout.

A good litmus test for bad Web-design is “does it fail on screen readers?”. Indeed this does; it makes pages near unnavigable.

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