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by icedchai 1913 days ago
Yep, CSS wasn't really supported anywhere until 1997. Most places were still using font tags and table-based layouts for quite a while after.
1 comments
jandrese 1913 days ago
And in the 90s CSS was unreliable and often difficult to use. Internet Explorer made it difficult to go full CSS for a long time.
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icedchai 1913 days ago
I still think CSS is difficult to use. Out of HTML/CSS/JS, I despise CSS the most.
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drummojg 1913 days ago
It's what drove me out of wanting to work in Web authoring. I looked at CSS and literally decided "I am not going to learn this."
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icedchai 1913 days ago
It has gotten a bit better. The early CSS era (floats, etc) was worse than tables, I thought.
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jandrese 1913 days ago
Early CSS had a huge problem with this.

"Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with tables and very common on the web. Getting that three column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.

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acherion 1913 days ago
> "Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message.

It was, but in hindsight maybe the message needed to be elaborated more. Perhaps it should've been "Don't use tables for layout, use CSS!"

Besides that, CSS IMO accelerated more complex and visually pleasing websites, and arguably spurned on the Web 2.0 look. Unfortunately, due to the message not specifying the for layout bit, it took a while for many devs to unlearn that tables are bad – tables aren't, they should just be used for tabular data.

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icedchai 1913 days ago
Yep, it was absurd. I remember spending hours fighting with CSS to do something that would've taken 5 minutes with tables. Maybe I was just bad at it.
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