[phkahler]

HTML tables are cognitively if not officially deprecated these days. I made my 1996 resume in HTML using a table for layout and it was indistinguishable from the Word version when printed. Made by editing the HTML by hand too!

Tables are great. I don't doubt that CSS stuff is more capable, but the old ones are still useful.

[xg15]

I think the problem was that tables were always supposed to be for things that look like actual tables in the output - for that purpose they are not deprecated.

What is discouraged is using tables as invisible layout grids - and that was their primary de-facto usecase before CSS and grid layouts. But that had always been a hack, even though a necessary one.

[leptons]

Tables are probably still useful for layout in HTML emails (for advertising). I haven't had to work with HTML emails in probably 20 years, but I doubt much has changed about what is and isn't allowed in HTML emails.

[euroderf]

> What is discouraged is using tables as invisible layout grids - and that was their primary de-facto usecase before CSS and grid layouts.

After too.

I've seen enough "Introduction to CSS"s filled with caveats and hemming & hawing to know that it's all to be avoided when+if possible. I know, I know, there's a whole wide wonderful world out there full of aligns and borders and containers and insets and margins and masks and offsets and paddings and positions oh my. Bleccch..

[joquarky]

How was it a hack?

Hack implies brittleness. Using tables for layout was just fine for all but the most ideologically pure pedants.

[fortyseven]

Yep. Tables for tabular data are still on the menu.

[cruffle_duffle]

Back in the early to mid 2000's, making your site "table free" while still working on IE6 was seen as a badge of masochistic pride.

Doing table-free multi-column layouts involved doing crazy “float: left/right + padding + margin” with an heavy sprinkle of IE6 clearfix hacks to work right. I mean eventually people dialed in the correct incantations to make table-free designs work for IE6 but it was never quite as straightforward or reliable as a good old fashioned table. Many megajoules of energy were wasted on webform drama between the pragmatic "fuck you, tables just work and I have shit to ship" webdev and the more academic "tables break the semantic web and aren't needed, use CSS." crew.

Like most things, the "tables are evil" mantra was taken too far and people started to use floated divs (or <li/>’s or <span/>’s or whatever) for shit that actually was tablular data! (I was guilty of this!).

And like most things, a lot of the drama went away when IE6 finally went away. People who weren't around back then simply cannot understand exactly how much IE6 held back modern web design. You could almost count on half your time being spent making shit work for IE6, despite the ever decreasing amount of traffic it got. I'm pretty sure I almost cried the day Google slapped a "IE6 will no longer be supported" on it's site.... the second they did that, my site got the exact same banner. Fuck IE6. The amount of costs that absolute pile of shit browser caused the industry exceeded the GDP of entire nations.

Anyway.... back to adding weird activex shit in my CSS so IE6 can support alpha-blended PNGs....

[icedchai]

I remember those days. It was simpler to use tables for layout than to use early CSS for quite a while.

[ranger_danger]

> HTML tables are cognitively if not officially deprecated these days.

According to who?