alt Hacker NewsThat's funny because the argument against tables was always that they added extra markup a.k.a lines of code, only to replace them with dozens of nested divs, half assed CSS layout ideologies (floats and clear's, for example) and barely functional JS that all somehow needed to work in sync which was almost never. That's how NPM was born.
Tables worked with 100% of the browsers. The alternatives needed polyfills and shims and ironically the whole thing needed easily 2x the number of integration time and lines of code compared to just slapping tables.
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Kudos • today at 3:37 PM
The argument was for markup to have semantic meaning, not number of lines. Also, NPM was not born for browser JS.
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There will always be a tension between those who want purely semantic documents and those who argue for a pragmatic allowance of layout to just be allowed in the document itself.
It’s indisputable though that the modern BS of frontend tech is approaching an asymptote of ridiculous complexity. The divs go so deep that it is often pointless to even try to determine what’s going on from a web inspector. And I think the documents themselves are now less semantic than they ever were. Sure, tables were abused (to the extent they weren’t anything close to tabular data). But today every element you see being a layer of 37 divs and spans that don’t even function or in some cases even render without JavaScript getting involved… the web is now just basically a responsive version of PDF.