> Hacker News as viewed by the Mac. Surprisingly readable given that MacWeb doesn’t support CSS.
Say what you will about table based layouts, but they sure are backwards compatible.
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CSS-based layouts, done right, still leave the underlying HTML heavily semantic. And even with a few extra un-semantic divs and spans around, you can just ignore those. The two biggest problems would be with sites that don't bother to put content in a sensible semantic order (putting huge amounts of sidebar/navigation content before the main content) and sites that generate everything with JavaScript with no fallbacks.
> CSS-based layouts, done right, still leave the underlying HTML heavily semantic.
Could you give an example? I've done "tables" in CSS, and most of the time you're using DIV to manage most of the positioning, which is non-semantic.
If there was a CSS table replacement which defaulted back to something which looked like a table in HTML, I'd be impressed.
If what you're building is actually a table, use table markup; that's the semantically correct markup. Just don't use it for something like a sidebar or footer, or otherwise for positioning.
If you're building a navigation area, a callout, or some similar semantically significant sidebar, take a look at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dom.html#sectioning-c... for the nav and aside elements.
But even if you use a div, as long as the semantic content makes sense without the div, you're fine. For instance, put one div with your article content starting with an appropriate heading tag, and another div for your navigation. Without the CSS, it still makes sense to have a section for content and a section for navigation.
Also, there is actually CSS markup to make something look like a table, if that's what you want; see http://caniuse.com/#feat=css-table for instance.
I agree with everything you're saying, but I'm not sure what this is a response to? The site layout looks acceptable on this 30 years old computer precisely because it does not care about semantics.
http://www.flownet.com/ron/css-rant.html
Still valid after all these years.
Well, we finally have flexbox now!
It's far from clear to me that flexbox actually solves the problem. For example, consider the following:
<table style='height: 100%; width: 100%'>
<tr><td align=center valign=center>
<h1>Hello world</h1>
The following button should be centered:<br>
<button>Button</button>
</td></tr>
</table>
[NOTE: This example has a bug in it. See the subsequent comments]
Doesn't simply replacing the table/tr/td with a div with "margin: auto; text-align: center" work? Seems to yield the same result, at least in Firefox.
Margin: auto doesn't center vertically. Also, it only centers the element that it applies to, not the contents of that element. My example was supposed to illustrate this, but it actually has a bug. I thought buttons didn't get centered by text-align, but they do. Here's an updated example:
<table style='height: 100%; width: 100%'>
<tr><td align=center valign=center>
<h1>Hello world</h1>
The following green square should be centered:<br>
<div style='width: 30px; height: 30px; background: green'></div>
</td></tr>
</table>
That's easy to do without tables. See display: table; and display: inside-block for the div. text-align: center, yadda.
Display: table is cheating, and essentially conceding that you should have been using tables all along. And there is no such thing as display: inside-block. (You probably meant inline-block.)
The devil is in the details. I believe if you try it you will find it is nowhere near as easy as you imagine.
Yes.
It also looks fairly decent in links2. Unfortunately the indentation of nested comments is missing, which makes comment threads a lot harder to parse.
But the table was why MacWeb took minutes to render a single page on the Mac Plus. That browser was horrible. I preferred MacLynx.