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Out of context: Reply #40
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- rafalski0
The good outcome of Web Standards is that because of both their design and browser implementation flaws the learning curve has changed.
Times when anyone could make a website are gone, we became experts and can charge the money we do. We have no right to complain actually.What was good about tables - and still draws people to them is that they provided grid, a solid yet flexible one. While obviously this can be recreated tablelessly, it's clear that CSS/XHTML was invented by people who treated content like flowing tata aligning itself as it went rather than grid-structured. This is why tableless methods still feel less natural to many designers.
Tables weren't meant for layout structuring, but they were good for it, even if underlying code was a mess.
They weren't the first example in the history of an invention that succeeded in something different from what it was meant or good for.
Take Coca-Cola: it failed as a medicine, was saved by and prospered thanks to rebadging it to a soft drink and what it's really good at is cleaning toilet residue.