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Comment by ryanvm | Hacker News Reader

That people have to resort to such creative contortions is a testament to what a shit pile CSS is.

CSS is perfectly fine for what it was designed for. Unfortunately, when it was being designed, tables were still viewed as perfectly acceptable for layout, and as far as I can tell, CSS didn't really aim to replace it. It seems to me that it was us OCD designers that wanted semantic markup who adopted CSS for layout, where sane people would use tables.

(EDIT: I should probably clarify that this is 100% speculation, and based in no way on having read anything published by the W3C or anything like that.)

Right now, everything sucks.

No, CSS is not "perfectly fine for what it was designed for", even if we disregard that it sucks at layout. It's only better than what came before it. It's been over a decade, and we don't even have good layout features or named constants. Of course, CSS's inadequacy is only compounded by the persistent standards noncompliance of certain major web browsers. But call a spade a spade; CSS ain't that great. If it were, we'd all leave tables for tabular data.

Why doesn't someone just fork Safari or Firefox and put in the thing-that-replaces-CSS parsing they'd like to use? A demo is almost always more convincing, and 99% of browser hacking is standards-compliance—it would take much less effort to blue-sky a new presentation language if it was a prototype for which you were the only user.

That people have to resort to such creative contortions is a testament to what a pile "Thou shalt not use tables for layout" is.

Tables ain't done 'til IE6 won't run!

creative contortions = hacking.

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