Took me 3 years of fighting with forums to admit the old dev was right about tables for layout

I used to be a hardcore CSS grid fanboy. 3 years ago I was rebuilding a forum theme for a classic car community I help mod on, and the old guy who built the original layout used tables. I told him he was living in 2003 and spent a whole weekend converting everything to grid. Looked great on my monitor but the moment I checked it on a mobile browser or in a small window it would completely break. Last month I finally gave up and rebuilt it with tables for the main structure. Worked perfect first try. Even the old email client views and tiny screens handled it fine. Now I get why he always said tables are built for aligning rows and columns and CSS is for styling. Has anyone else had to eat crow and go back to an older method because it just worked better for specific site designs?

2 comments

2 Comments

matthew_owens98d ago

300 dollars worth of custom work down the drain when I hit mobile. Tables saved me too.

nancys908d ago

And @matthew_owens9 I feel your pain on that 300 bucks. It's like how people swear by those fancy kitchen gadgets but a good old chef knife and a cast iron pan will outlast everything. I've noticed this pattern everywhere, not just web stuff. People get caught up in what's new and cool, then realize the old way was popular for a reason. Tables are stable, they don't break when you squeeze them, same way a paper map never needs a signal to work. Sometimes you just have to respect the grumpy old guys who kept doing it the simple way.