It never works like I want it to, and I never know if it's because I'm dumb or the tool is poorly-designed, and by then I've wasted two hours, so I always end up just going back to tables because they freaking work.

The good news is now flexbox and grid work in all modern browsers, so this is (finally) a solved problem

I was not really interested if those doing a "View Source" are going to be offended by my "incorrect" use of tables.

The only issue with floats was that there were a lot of edge cases that happened in only certain browsers, so you had to be careful. Lots of browser bugs.

Job security.

From a practical point of view too, if you wanted to make separate mobile and desktop views just by using different stylesheets, using a table made it very difficult.

(That said, in 2000, if you were using separate mobile and screen stylesheets, you were in an extreme minority because there were relatively few full HTML web browsers on mobile devices. Instead, most phones, if they could access the Internet, accessed a different version of the Internet accessed over WAP.)

Called these "faux columns" and a basic 3-column layout was so difficult it was referred to as the "holy grail" of layouts

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_grail_(web_design)#Faux_c...

    .clearfix::after {
      content: "";
      clear: both;
      display: table;
    }

If you tell 2 beginners to build something with PHP/jQuery/JS, and send one person to W3Schools and the other to PHP.net/jquery.org/MDN, I have no doubt that the W3schools person will get something done in workable state faster.

In any case, "W3" is just another representation of 'www', which the W3C doesn't have any kind of claim over.

OpenAI isn't open. W3Schools is unaffiliated with the W3C. The world keeps spinning.

That's optimistic, optimistically. It's a group of ivory tower academics with no stake in any browser implementation acting like they have any right to tell actual browser implementors how to behave.

Well, I totally prefer that, than letting Google decide by themselves

And besides, what makes you think Google listens to them?

The name is so confusing that if you search for "w3c" on DuckDuckGo, the first result is W3Schools, and then the official W3C website.

Some programming languages ship a good tutorial as part of their documentation (e.g. Python), but not all.

That's not the point though, I'm not going to say different strokes for different folks.

Instead I'd say, if that beginner uses the 'slower' path instead, that will pay dividends in time -- they are better of learning to use the docs than getting paid peanuts for delivering that project which depends on the juniors faster.

So a beginner should use w3schools while they see fit, and then move on to MDN, etc. when they find it to be unsuitable for their purposes.

A beginner on the other hand would have their SO questions locked/closed within minutes because it would likely break any one of the thousand little rules SO has (to reduce duplicates) that are unknown to beginners.

Horses for courses; I read the official MDN and PHP docs now, but I didn't when I began because those sites assume an enormous amount of prior knowledge about programming.

From the looks of it, it seems like blocking w3schools is quite popular among Kagi users [1].

[1]: https://kagi.com/stats

I have a feeling I know your answer - as a financial professional I initially used Investopedia in a pinch but over the years realized their accuracy has an inverse relation with the specificity of the topic. After seeing incorrect formulas and descriptions a handful of times, I eventually stopped using it completely.

Note: If you think web browsers are weird, just wait until you try doing things in email clients or - $deity forbid - ebook readers.

As you say, it was weird and initially quite difficult to wrap my head around it. Surprisingly, I didn't actually learn about the "clearfix" hack until a couple of years later when I interviewed for a Front-End job at - of all places - Fox News.

The person who I talked with there gave me a take-home to work on and send back. Tl;dr I didn't get it quite right because I hadn't really taken the time to understand what the particular styles did to the layout.

Fast-forward to today and I'm using floats w/ @print and a div class of "clearfix" set to "both" in order to reset the layout of a document that was converted from Word's .docx to HTML.

How times change.

Madness!

Generally speaking, if I see an HTML e-mail I know the other end cares NOTHING about security or efficiency, and is actively trying to snoop on me with analytics.

Not surprising you had to fall back to very old HTML to hit a common featureset.

To your point that HTML can be a security risk, I remember interviewing at The College Board in mid 2011 and finding out that they still sent critical information - think testing admission tickets - with a MIME type of text/plain.

If you need to guarantee delivery and readability, no matter where people are getting the message, I don’t see how you can do it any other way.

That was an essential part of my CSS toolbox for years, and something that ended up being one of the first things added in every new project.

https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/clear-fix/

Fell out of use because "nobody uses IE for Mac" :)

Old CSS never dies, it just goes to live on a very special farm upstate where it only has to do 1 or 2 jobs.

I made an SVG interface for displaying/editing diagrams using nw.js (essentially Electron). It would adapt the SVG viewport height and width based on the amount of space that's actively being used so that scrollbars will appear only when needed.

The interface would work perfectly in Chromium and Firefox. But in nw.js I was using their menu api to display a window menu. That menu wasn't part of the DOM-- not sure how nw.js displays that menu but you can't introspect it in devTools. Anyhow, this was somehow creating an off-by-one problem where scrollbars would one pixel too early.

The only way I stumbled upon to fix the issue was to set the SVG style to add "float: left;"

Any ideas on what magic spell this casts? Technically the svg was the only DOM element in the page. I never did figure it out.

I met your children -- what did you tell them?

It's still here on HN of course, included in every page request:

https://news.ycombinator.com/s.gif

- Faux columns, to get a visual stretch and make it appear that the sidebar was as long as the content https://alistapart.com/article/fauxcolumns/

- Or take that even further, with a nine-patch and 9 div's or a 3x3 table you could hack your own borders by repeating backgrounds in some axis. With CSS3 we got border-image that could help this a bit. These border styles aren't that much in favor anymore, though.

- To make rounded borders, one could use the nine-patch. But many would also use a generator to make some HTML that basically simulated a rounded border, by making lots of elements. Found this article describing it: http://benogle.com/2009/04/29/css-round-corners.html Conventional wisdom was that the added markup would be more bytes than an image would be, but less roundtrips and quite easy to do.

The other nice thing was the use of the cicada principle for a background styling pattern that 'do not repeat.'

It’s still so clean though after all these years.

Still live on our main-website because there’s never time to replace it with something more modern ;)

- Use HTML tables for layout

Hahaha :)

On a more serious note, this list highlights how development without standards leads to control information being encoded in various tolerable side-channels.

The potential mess and collision of this brings into relief the disdain that's sometimes levelled at the current W3C process. This process marries a standards-driven evolution of web technologies with browser-driven innovation, with the two alternately either leading the other, or proceeding in lock-step.

While it's often derided, this process could be interpreted as more sustainable and stable than the one which came before.

I wonder how many of those who decry the new W3C-vendor norm would choose to return to the heady days recalled by these 10 weird hacks? :)

I don't think it's a lack of standards, it's more of a lack of necessary functionality. If the thing you want to do isn't an addressed feature, you'll do it one way or another creatively. Standards provide rigidity that create this situation to begin with unless the standard is mature enough that it captures all the potential needs, especially in cases like the web where your often locked to some standard that may or may not suit your needs. In other spaces, you usually have enough options that one thing or another is flexible enough you can do what you need to do and go with that choice.

Having worked in research long enough you'd be surprised how often something someone wants to do requires some hacky technology approach because many standards exist around business/consumer interaction and systems built around that, because that's where the money is which drives those standards and feature sets.

It's not really possible to separate that from functionality.

Your point about the potential rigidity of standards is well taken. However, it’s important to note that a standard, by its nature, doesn’t necessarily have to be rigid and inflexible in a way that hinders progress or creativity. Standards can be designed with adaptability in mind, providing a stable foundation while still allowing for innovation and flexibility. This balanced approach ensures that standards serve as helpful guidelines, not as constraints that stifle growth or possibilities.

Your final point about the practical realities where standards rubber meets the road, so to speak, is also a good one. But there's a distinction between the type of standards you might be referring to, such as in manufacturing or quality assurance, and web. In the former, standards indeed can produce this kind of regulatory capture or bloated compliance industry, and associated restriction on innovation and competition. And on the other hand, the type of standards that we mean when we talk about the web, even though it's the same word, I think they're very distinct in fundamental ways.

Although they share the same terminology, web standards tend to be more about enabling interoperability, innovation, and accessibility, rather than imposing restrictive regulations. However, restrictions do occur and they are sometimes abused, seemingly by big vendors to enhance their value capture by penalizing alternatives in the name of “user safety”. In that sense, web standards can share the “corruption of standards” which I think is invoked by your last point.

Bootstrap first adopted Flexbox for its grid system Bootstrap 4 (2018), and Bootstrap 5 (2021) added support for Grid. It's conservative about supporting new web standards, but I wouldn't personally think of it as a "legacy" framework.