[JimDabell]

They did, in fact, design CSS to implement this kind of design easily. You were able to implement that in a simple way without any weird hacks using only the functionality in CSS 2.0, published in 1998.

Unfortunately, the simple way was to use display: table-cell, and Microsoft didn’t implement that part of the standard until Internet Explorer 8, released in 2009. And since old browser versions stuck around longer back in those days, it was several years after that before web developers could count on it.

If it weren’t for Microsoft abandoning Internet Explorer development for five entire years once they got a browser monopoly, you could’ve been doing this in a much simpler way more than a decade sooner.

You’re blaming the W3C for not putting an easy way to do it into the standard but they did put it into the standard. It’s just what they put into the standard didn’t matter – Internet Explorer had >90% market share so Microsoft didn’t care about the standards and paralysed the industry for over a decade.

A truly vast amount of the weird hacks we had to do back then was simply papering over the shortcomings of Internet Explorer.

[icedchai]

CSS was the worst part of the HTML/CSS/JS combo. It was easier to build layouts with tables, 1995 style, for a very long time.