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Comment by ethana | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why this is such a big problem.

The grid usage for flex just really remind me of the early days where everyone used table,td,tr for layout. You can just set the width/height with percentage and everything would scale. The only thing is that it not wrap-able like with div blocks, but that's what div was invented for.

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It still burns that HTML Tables had this simple layout issue almost solved. CSS v1 could have just codified that behavior, and worked on improving it later. This is just emphasized by the "holy grail" example of the 3 column layout. That is a decade of lost productivity thanks to the people who said "tables for layout is stupid"[1].

It is too bad that GiveUpAndUseTables[2] is no longer working, because I would still send it to people.

[1] http://www.hotdesign.com/seybold/everything.html

[2] http://giveupandusetables.com/

The thing that's less often remembered is that tables had their own, completely different set of quirks which had to be learned and worked around, such that people eventually internalized all of it and figured that since they were no longer conscious of the problems, there must not be any and so "tables are so much easier".

I never actually saw that giveupandusetables website but found this: http://ajaxian.com/wp-content/images/giveupandusetables.png Is that the page?

Yes. The timer was set to 47 mins for you to attempt your pure CSS layout, and would count down to your inevitable failure. Someone also built an opposing "Use CSS" timer, but I cannot find that one.

display: table-cell, table-row, table sounds like it would be quite viable for an entire sites layout. I've never tried it but I'm tempted to blanket style all section tags as tables, article tags as rows, divs as cells - or some variant of that. Still, the use of existing tags is perhaps a silly limitation when we can choose to use a non-strict html spec.

Anyone know of examples of this, like a boilerplate called fuck-me-just-use-tables?

Let's not start this flame war again please.

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