I am too young to have ever used tables for anything else than table data. I am almost 30 years old today and have worked as a dev my whole career.

We sure have made some progress!

I'd say you started too late, I'm only 2 years older and when I took my first steps, tables were still a layout tool ;)

Do a View Source on a HN page!

Oh my god

I take it, that you've never had to work with html emails then? groans You lucky soul!

Creating HTML emails for Outlook is what I imagine the entire web was like several decades ago.

Not so much as you didn't end up trying stuff only to find it didn't work for some client and you could get away with just targeting Netscape and IE on an 800x600 screen.

My first website in '96 had a repeatable background image with text over the top. That's still problematic in email templates and easiest to avoid.

I have, but I have always used normal html+css?

That works for simple emails, but when you start creating more complex designs tables are an essential tool to ensuring that every element behaves as you would expect:

https://templates.mailchimp.com/getting-started/html-email-b...

Building these types of emails without tables is doable, but you are going to get a lot of inconsistency depending on the device/client/browser.

I had worked on a project in 2010. It was a service that let you pick email stationary, customize it, and had a Outlook add-in and a bookmarklet.

It "worked" in Outlook (2003, 2007, 2010), Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail. And had to display correctly to the recipient in each of those clients.

It was by far the biggest pain in the ass I've ever worked on. Tables weren't enough to make it work outright. Outlook 2007+ couldn't do background images on a table cell, gmail would collapse empty cells, hotmail would remove certain inline styles, and yahoo was actually pretty nice.

The company I worked for took the project on for an equity split + payment plan, we saw a few hundred dollars from it before they went out of business.

Count yourself as lucky for not having to build designs/layouts in tables! Oh what a travesty that was.

I still have to google how they work

15 years later...

/me googles...

It seems they made things "simpler" by replacing all tags with `div`.

I made one perfect template that loads right in everything so I can make a new site without relearning web dev every time. I will never modify it out of fear of breaking it.