[lisper]

> The problem you describe only becomes an issue if you use <table>s for layout in the first place, so just don't do that.

I could just as easily say that the "problem of overloaded operators" only becomes a problem if you try to use + to add anything other than two ints. So don't do that.

But OK, assuming I accept the premise, what should I do instead? The CSS community has been dithering about the answer for years. Only very recently has there been anything even remotely approaching an acceptable solution i.e. a solution that actually reproduces table layouts without having to pile on a ton of hacks. In the intervening years, a lot of legacy code was produced that used <table> for layout because it was the only thing that actually worked.

There also the fact that <display-table><tr><td> or something like that just looks a lot cleaner and is easier to read than <div class=table-for-display><div class=table-row-for-display><div class=table-cell-for-display>. When you make complex table layout you end up with a lot of TR and TD tags, so it makes sense to keep those short to avoid cluttering things up.

[goto11]

If you genuinely want a layout exactly like a html table you use display:table. You probably don't, but it is there if you want.

You don't really need repeated class=table-row-for-display etc, this can be achieved by CSS contextual selectors.

But in reality html tables was not designed as an all-round layout tool in the first place and the layout algorithm was never specified in detail. Flexbox and flexgrid are typically more appropriate and powerful as layout tools.

[lisper]

> display:table

I tried that once many years ago. It didn't work. It might work today but I no longer care.

> this can be achieved by CSS contextual selectors

That would be true if display:table worked, but it doesn't (or at least it didn't) and so it doesn't.

And you still need some markup for the contextual selectors to work on. The obvious choice is <table><tr><td>, or, if it existed, <display-table><tr><td>. Maybe <grid><gr><gd> but that's not going to happen.

[goto11]

> That would be true if display:table worked, but it doesn't (or at least it didn't) and so it doesn't.

Can you describe the problem you are having?

[lisper]

No. That last time I tried it was many years ago. Maybe it works now. I neither know nor care.

[goto11]

So you are basically just trolling at this point.

[lisper]

No, I'm giving you honest answers to your questions. Just because I have not gone back to explore a broken feature to see if it is no longer broken doesn't make me a troll.

But my point stands even if display:table works nowadays. The problem is not what you have to type in order to specify that some piece of markup should be displayed as a table even though it is not semantically a table. What matters is how much you have to type, and whether you have to redundantly specify that a table is for display only on every row and cell. To use display:table you also have to specify display:table-row and display:table-cell, and you have to do it again and again and again and again even though all this information is redundant and only needs to be specified once at the top level. There is absolutely no rational justification for this. It would be as if you had to specify the type of a variable in C not just when it was declared, but again every single time you referenced it.