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Comment by corytheboyd | Hacker News Reader

This sounds crazy to me, the flex system is exactly this but also semantically correct. You can’t possibly be telling me that table hacks of yore are easier than this, a clearly designed system for the actual problem you want to solve https://css-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/css-flexbo...

I’m not at all a frontend person, I just think flex is one of the best systems I have ever used. It usually gets the job done in a way that I expected to work (and that bar is pretty low lol)

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No, tables are the right solution: nonoverlapping elements arranged in a sane way that is easy to reason about. The arguments about semantics so everything can be a div are hilarious -- it really doesn't matter.

Flex is great but tables are also a natural solution for anything grid-based, which of course layouts almost always are. The whole internet used to do stuff like this before the structural flow of content became important:

    <table width="100%" height="100%">
      <tr>
        <td colspan="2" height="50">  header  </td>
      </tr>
      <tr>
        <td width="200" valign="top">  sidebar  </td>
        <td valign="middle">  content  </td>
      </tr>
    </table>

Bring back the 90's. ;) The memories of spacer gifs...

I still find myself missing Macromedia Fireworks on occasion!

GP is also wrong anyway, CSS Flex is the wrong thing for creating layouts like this. We now have CSS Grid, which is the actual replacement for table-based layouts (which were used more recently than people like to admit because of Flex not working for two-dimensional layouts).

Sorry, I often conflate flex and grid, they occupy the same spot in my mind as “1 dimensional” and “2 dimensional” versions of the same underlying thing. I am wrong.

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