The reason tables for layout were so bad was that the table as a whole couldn't be rendered (laid out) properly until every cell was fully rendered first, including images with unspecified width/height attributes as well as dynamic cell dimensions based on free-flowing text, etc. Floating div tags still cause redraws for containers with content requiring dimensions to be determined at runtime, but at least something would display. It was also easier to see which divs were causing redraws because their dimensions were not fixed, and thus developers could focus on those specific regions to try and add fixed dimensions.
throw_m239339|4 years ago
> The reason tables for layout were so bad was that the table as a whole couldn't be rendered (laid out) properly until every cell was fully rendered first, including images with unspecified width/height attributes as well as dynamic cell dimensions based on free-flowing text, etc [...]
That was purely a limitation of the CSS rendering engines, it had absolutely nothing do to with table layout themselves, from a developer perspective. There is no reason this problem cannot/couldn't be worked out by CSS rendering engine developers. I get what you are saying, but it wasn't a good enough reason to dismiss tables entirely (and that wasn't the biggest reason used back then when "a list apart" writers decided that tables were cancer).
Floats were so good yet developers had to resort to CSS frameworks and grid frameworks for years in order to make working with CSS bearable? No, float positioning was horrible, un-intuitive and just a hack. Again, the culprit was CSS itself (and by extension the rendering engines), not the developer using tables.
The irony is that all these CSS frameworks were essentially tables re-implemented on top of "floating divs".
A good measure of whether a web spec is good or not, or pragmatic enough or not is how much effort developers go through in order not to use that spec directly. Generally, if using a framework on top of the spec to make that spec somehow useful is what most developers do, it means that the spec needs to be revised and improved in order to fulfil the needs of the developer, not the other way around. Obviously that doesn't apply to low level protocols like WebRTC and co, but CSS isn't a low level protocol, it was supposed to make web presentation easy, and it failed at it for decades. That's all I'm saying.
Just thank god we now have at the very least Flexbox and Grid. Which makes bootstrap and co completely redundant even for devs allergic to design.