[wildrhythms]

I started learning web development back in the day of IE6 and table-based layouts. It's actually incredible how many modern designs I see today that are portraying a table, but have recreated the <table> element (and its associated <tr> and <td> elements) in a soup of flex layout divs and such.

With that said, centering is not difficult. The difficulty comes in not realizing that flex layout is essentially the same rows and columns you used before, but with better controls for wrapping elements (tables can't do that easily).

Edit: Some more nostalgia: Cutting out rounded corners and shadows in Photoshop with the slice tool because there was no border-radius or box-shadow at the time :)

[Bilal_io]

The reason I personally prefer using divs with flexbox is responsiveness, and it gives me more control overall. I've always hated tables, even for tables, let alone to structure a whole page.

[wildrhythms]

Tables are special. The width of a cell is determined by the widest cell in the column. The height of a cell is determined by the tallest cell in the row. I have yet to see a convincing replication of the simplicity of the native <table> element with a flex layout. Consider the colspan and rowspan attributes for additional complexity.

You are right that flex offers much more... flexibility. But tables adhere to a certain set of rules that I don't think is easily implemented with flexbox.

[Bilal_io]

"The width of a cell is determined by the widest cell in the column. The height of a cell is determined by the tallest cell in the row"

I've achieved the same with css grid. I genuinely don't think table are needed anymore, unless you're building a page to display data and don't care about responsiveness.

[wruza]

A grid also has a nice property of maximum 1000 rows, which holds back from bad practices of showing tables entirely. Much easier to find data by paging and a special search box rather than searching through the page.

[cma]

> Much easier to find data by paging and a special search box rather than searching through the page.

Please just make it optional to show all, I already have a regex search extension.

[wildrhythms]

To my knowledge, there is no implementation for rowspan or colspan attributes in a flex grid. Also, to note, I am not advocating for table-based layouts for non-tabular data.

[JimDabell]

Parent was talking about grid. You seem to be talking about flexbox but calling it “flex grid” instead – you know grid and flexbox are two separate things, right? Grid definitely has the equivalent of rowspan/colspan.

[wildrhythms]

Yes, and there is no equivalent for rowspan/colspan in a grid or flex grid without resorting to CSS modifications in the former and nested containers in the latter.

[silvestrov]

My biggest problem with tables is that I can't control in which columns the additional space goes with a table wider than content, e.g. when table has style width:100%

Often this should be the "description" column and not the "number of items" or "price" columns.

I'd really like a "flex-grow" for table columns.

(And I can't use display:grid as it doesn't have running headers/footers for PDF files)

[dylan604]

>Cutting out rounded corners and shadows in Photoshop with the slice tool because there was no border-radius or box-shadow at the time :)

Dreamweaver and it's auto-slicing and table layout function was insane. So many bad web designs were created by me with it.

[egeozcan]

I was having so much fun also with Coffee Cup HTML Editor and its "DHTML" widgets. Slice in Dreamweaver, export, open in Coffee, add useless widgets, re-export, drag and drop the horrendously generated HTML file in random ftp program and voila, you have something that maybe works on a specific version of IE but a lot of fun.

[deergomoo]

> It's actually incredible how many modern designs I see today that are portraying a table, but have recreated the <table> element (and its associated <tr> and <td> elements) in a soup of flex layout divs and such

To play devil’s advocate, <table> can be frustratingly inadequate even for tabular data, if you want to add some bells and whistles.

Things like resizable/reorderable columns aren’t too tricky, but if you want things like sticky rows or columns things get very messy very quickly.

I’m convinced that the negative qualities of modern web development stem from the built-in controls being largely stuck in 1995.

[egeozcan]

Just a heads up (pun maybe subconsciously intended): "position: sticky" works surprisingly well on table-headers.

Demo: https://jsfiddle.net/Lkye3cpq/

[paulryanrogers]

As a counterpoint Firefox can select and copy columns or rows from traditional tables.

[blondin]

wait. flex-based layout has not fixed centering.

nothing which has been done since table-based layout has an intuitive and cross-browser way for doing vertical and horizontal centering. that's what i think GP meant.

i do not want to see tables back but i do admit that they did exactly, and intuitively, what you would expect of them.

[trs8080]

???

.box { display: flex; align-items: center; justify-content: center; width: 500px; height: 500px; }

.box div { width: 100px; height: 100px; }

<div class="box"> <div>this is centered vertically and horizontally</div> </div>

also, using tables for layout isn't semantically correct. it's like using `map` as a for loop. also, consider folks with disabilities who rely on screen readers.

[eyelidlessness]

Centering has been an easily solved problem with both flex and grid for years. If you’re having trouble with conflicting styles, you can revert them with, well, revert. You can even revert all of them with revert: all. But I don’t recommend that. If you’re still having trouble centering things I’d recommend getting familiar with the cascade and removing styles that conflict with what you’re centering.

[eyelidlessness]

Can’t edit now but I’d be remiss if I didn’t correct myself. You can revert all styles with `all: revert`, but I still don’t recommend that.