There is no winning, is there? Half of HN wants browsers to revert to document readers and the other half wants HTML and CSS to do what JS can. A small minority then insists that we should get rid of HTML and CSS entirely and start from scratch. The louder the ideas the further away the person is from actually using the tech. I personally would not have the patience for community management.

That said, CSS masonry looks solid.

> HTML has become more and more bloated. How many methods do we need to do something that was possible back in the 90s?

This is incorrect. Lots of old stuff was removed or deprecated from the HTML5 specification; elements like `s`, `u` were repurposed from being presentational to semantic:

- acronym

- applet

- basefont

- big

- center

- dir

- font

- frame

- frameset

- isindex

- noframes

- s

- strike

- tt

- u

- xmp

- noembed

- plaintext

While I like a Karl Pilkington quote as much as the next guy, I really do want this. I have one specific use case for this layout that's always felt a little bit painful to reach into js for. I can't wait for the day I can simplify that further into native CSS.

How was this masonry layout possible back in the 90s?