Tables worked with 100% of the browsers. The alternatives needed polyfills and shims and ironically the whole thing needed easily 2x the number of integration time and lines of code compared to just slapping tables.
It’s indisputable though that the modern BS of frontend tech is approaching an asymptote of ridiculous complexity. The divs go so deep that it is often pointless to even try to determine what’s going on from a web inspector. And I think the documents themselves are now less semantic than they ever were. Sure, tables were abused (to the extent they weren’t anything close to tabular data). But today every element you see being a layer of 37 divs and spans that don’t even function or in some cases even render without JavaScript getting involved… the web is now just basically a responsive version of PDF.
You can generally do a lot of the same things with CSS grid layouts, but it's 100x more complicated, and the layout information is generally in the CSS file rather than the document itself making parsing the layout a Hard problem demanding the implementation of a partial CSS engine (and a sometimes JS engine too).
[1] A totally viable workflow was to draw your website in something like photoshop, cut boxes where the content would go, and then export it to an HTML table.
Marketing email is still produced in this exact same way at some companies - ask me how I know!
(If anyone isn’t familiar with this, it’s because for security reasons we’ve all decided email should use an intentionally gimped de facto (non-)standard which only supports a few little dabs of CSS - 90% of email is formatted with strictly 90s technology.
And by “we” I mean that’s what Google and MS allow in their clients, so it’s very pointless to try to go beyond that given their combined usage share.
Or even a regular expression.
Out of all similar situations, where I may have been an early adopter of a technology or method for reasons, using the web platform and following standards has probably been the one I least regret.
I built my own website like this and I love it. Highly recommended.
[0]: and to using dozens of images sliced to fit your table cells, for that cool hover effect as well as round corners. :-)
It was bad enough I swore off front end work and made a pact with myself to focus only on backend or embedded, for my own mental health :-)
I do miss those times.
I miss those times, too, but not the IE6 bullshit.
In short almost everyone wants their website to be a video game.
I’ve seen an address form with search dropdowns that were absolutely bonkers. First it loads the list of countries. You start typing and the list disappears – it sends the text to backend, which returns... exactly the same list. The filtering is then done on the frontend. (After you select the country, you can select the region and then the city, which, of course, work exactly the same.)
Or even better. XML + XLST.
True separation of representation and data.
Is thousands of nested <div> really a good idea?
- <http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/> - <https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/> - <https://www.thegreatestmotherfucking.website/> - <https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/>
And there are probably even more.