Re:Why is CSS the way it is?
by notahacker on Thursday July 23, 2020 @06:08PM
(#23933017)
I think there's two separate issues. Firstly they really ought to have been able to anticipate the need for more precise layout tooling by late 1996. Sure, the web was a much more flexible looking place, but grids for high profile commercial sites like AOL and Space Jam already existed, and it's not like they didn't have decades of print layouts to learn from.
Secondly, the later 'thou shalt not use tables' edict from the sort of people who actually joined the relevant W3C committees came after a few years of ubiquitous table use due to the limitations of CSS, but more importantly several years before Flexbox and Grid were even draft specs [other unsuccessful drafts existed]. People used tables because CSS wasn't good at the sort of layout they wanted to achieve, and in response W3C members... told them that tables were evil to screenreaders and they should suck it up and use hacks for at least the next decade
Arguably floats weren't well designed anyway (floating an image inside a box was all kinds of trouble except in IE which disregarded the spec's insistence it was supposed to overhang the bottom) but there was already a case for a proper grid and even that's comparatively minor compared with the 13 year gap before the draft spec for the next gen layout syntax.
Secondly, the later 'thou shalt not use tables' edict from the sort of people who actually joined the relevant W3C committees came after a few years of ubiquitous table use due to the limitations of CSS, but more importantly several years before Flexbox and Grid were even draft specs [other unsuccessful drafts existed]. People used tables because CSS wasn't good at the sort of layout they wanted to achieve, and in response W3C members... told them that tables were evil to screenreaders and they should suck it up and use hacks for at least the next decade
Arguably floats weren't well designed anyway (floating an image inside a box was all kinds of trouble except in IE which disregarded the spec's insistence it was supposed to overhang the bottom) but there was already a case for a proper grid and even that's comparatively minor compared with the 13 year gap before the draft spec for the next gen layout syntax.