> Related: I also love when I can't paste tabular data into Excel/etc. anymore

Except that’s exactly where tables should be used. So if you can’t, someone has really misunderstood CSS.

Use it for tables, not for layout.

I think it was advised a bit too early, but ever since flexbox entered the scene, tables for page formatting became irrelevant.

And just in case, nobody ever said tables were dead. Tables were declared bad practice for page formatting, not for tabular data.

They shamed everybody into the torturous use of floats for layout and then eventually, about 15 years later, added layout features back into a layout language.

> I will never understand

I think it's fairly easy to understand if you understand what it was a backlash against. Tables today are used sensibly, for the most part, but the pre-CSS world was truly absurd in its table use.

The reaction may well have been over-the-top, but it wasn't disproportionate given the state of table usage at the time.

CSS's initial forays into layout seem bad today because people think of tables in terms of their intended use (not the now long-gone monstrosities the community actually extracted from them), but in comparison to the previous ecosystem, floats were a relative godsend.

This is somehow worse than "never use goto"; because there are plenty of good uses for tables, and CSS was lacking features for forever after the clowns declared "tables bad" and the other clowns followed without thinking

The killer argument at the time (and even now most likely) is that screen readers could not distinguish whether the table was used for layout or for data and therefore sight-impaired users would have trouble.

The argument doesn't make sense because it is not too hard for a screenreader to understand whether a table is used for layout and even if it was hard the problem would more easily be solved by just adding an attribute to the table to indicate that it is used for layout.

Tables aren’t dead, they never were… when displaying tabular data. When it comes to layout I think you might be wearing rose tinted glasses. Remember having to put a 1px image in a table cell to avoid it disappearing? Remember “best viewed at 800x600”? I’m personally not nostalgic for either.

sidenote: as a teen, i would regularly layout posters and presentations in excel.. the page preview dashed-border and the grid stability was such a relief compared to word

> the ability to reliably center things. Assuming one agrees that we even did regain it.

Is there anyone who does not agree that we can reliably center things in CSS nowadays?

My favorite part about that is how we came back around to display:grid

I try to politely debate the proponents with each hype cycle giving them the benefit of the doubt. They lost the "lets get rid of tables" debate quite miserably. I would quickly slap something together in jsfiddle, they would try recreate it. Adding some col- and/or rowspan programmatically for cells with the same value. Give an rgba color to rows and nth cells (columns). Resizing columns by size of cell content. It took tons of ugly css to replicate. Pasting the table into a wysiwyg editor is something they can never hope to re-create.

Usually I declare victory when they say that tables might get depreciated in the future.

They at one point really wanted to get rid of framesets. I asked how to make the classic scrollable resizable side top bottom UI in pure CSS. We've tried for hours, everything we tried looked ugly and didn't fully work. framesets are here to stay now :)

I still have one of the funnier "how to make this without tables?" challenges. It's not a very good example of the use of tables but did make me laugh.

https://go-here.nl/omg-tables.html