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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

The amusing thing about web design trends is the dislike of tables, followed by the creation of CSS and JavaScript hacks to create columnar web design. Tables are now back, but they're called "layout tables".

What's been lost are the good page layout tools that didn't require manually writing HTML and CSS. Macromedia Dreamweaver once allowed laying out a page without even looking at HTML source. Now, you can't even buy Dreamweaver; it's rental-only.

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There are still Dreamweaver like tools, they are just terrible and produce completely unmaintainable code that doesn't work with anything other than simple static sites. If anything tools like Dreamweaver/Frontpage were made obsolete by Wordpress and services like Squarespace, etc.

Also, I'm not sure what you are really referring to in your first paragraph or what the fact that you can only rent Dreamweaver (true for the entire Adobe Suite) has to do with anything.

Please point me to something about "layout tables" because I haven't hear of or seen a resurgence of <table/> layouts.

I'm not sure many people refer to "layout tables", but a significant proportion of the online "grid systems" and "frameworks" are dedicated to essentially producing the same functionality as <CENTER><TABLE><TR><TD COLSPAN="2" VALIGN="centre"> etc. in a more verbose, less reliable manner, using HTML classes, CSS and the odd JS hack.

That's what gets me. The div/float/clear approach, which is one-dimensional, is a poor match to "modern grid layouts". Elaborate CSS gimmicks are needed to fake it. Here are four of them: http://www.sitepoint.com/easy-responsive-css-grid-layouts/ One just uses tables.

Now we have "grid" as a primitive in CSS. Inevitably, it needs a special case for some versions of Internet Explorer. There's "grid", and there's "-ms-grid". Here's the W3C spec.

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid/

It's a lot like tables, but it uses different terminology and has some extra bells and whistles, so that makes it OK.

Unfortunately you kind of have to understand a lot about the HTML and CSS to make sure the layout will be correct on a dizzing combination of actual resolutions, fake resolutions, screen sizes, aspect ratios, "finger sizes" and viewer distances. All without a reliable way to find out most of that information. :-|

However there is always the burger to the rescue.

☰ <- yum!

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