skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It doesn't, not even in theory.

CSS did a good job of freeing us from layouts that were dominated by concrete layout, stretchy invisible gifs and so on. But CSS does not separate content and presentation. CSS still depends on concrete layout to work. You often can't have a feature of your style that doesn't have a div or whatever attached to it. (The pseudo-selectors are a horrible hack to try to fix this.)

The problem is that we were all collectively duped into not wanting things that CSS didn't give us.

An example: I used to lay out the music and entertainment section of my college newspaper. With CSS, you can't even do a multiple column layout that flows, and PageMaker had that on day one.

Sometimes, I would design a headline that ripped right through articles in the middle of the page. Even diagonally. I can't imagine how you could do that in CSS, without tedious calculations and placing concrete divs into your text.

Even if some of what I've said is possible, very, very few designers seem to be able to cope with this. The evidence is that most of them struggle just to get two-column layouts that don't even flow, if one judges by the number of tutorials.
The strength of CSS layouts is flexibility. Yes, you need to fiddle a bit with it to make it all work, but the majority of the stuff is done in an external CSS file. Redesigning parts of a CSS site is much easier than with a table -- indeed it is almost impossible with a table in some cases because it is so static. With CSS you can change positioning and float it in another direction for example. A lot of repositioning can be done with absolute positioning, though floats are more ideal for the "core" structure.

I think the example provided in the article is good though. CSS layouts should be so trivial to do, and it's a shame they're not. Going back to tables doesn't come without a cost however.
Indeed, this is very much what I already do. For all non-functional aspects, IE6 is not catered for. For example, transparent pngs are assumed supported. If you visit in IE6 you will see lots of blocky icons and images for rounded corners and such. Layout is roughly right, but no effort is made in getting it pixel perfect.
I've been defending Wal-Mart (not that they need my help) against idiots ever since I work there. People never consider the alternative. Wal-Mart may pay little, but the stores they replaced pay less. One Wal-Mart may use a lot of electricity, but the 20 stores they replace would have used more. And so on and so forth.

It's very easy to look at Wal-Mart in a vacuum and call it an atrocity, but when you compare it to the real world alternatives, it's one of the best things to ever happen to America.
I think it's pretty obvious that often tables are better and more intuitive to use for layout than CSS. The problem is that we've been told for so long that tables for layout are bad that it makes one feel kind of dirty using them.

Web page layout should be simple it shouldn't require months/years of experience to work around CSS limitations and browser quirks to get some text and pretty pictures to display right.

Sometimes I spend (waste) hours working on a CSS layout because it makes me feel clever, but lately I've been shrugging my shoulders, going the easier route, sending an invoice and moving on :)
what? i think you are focusing on the wrong problem people.
Thanks for the chart. That is some great work. I will use it tomorow, it is 3 a.m here now.
The thing is a consumer you don't sell all your stuff all personally. So its hard to tell, but maybe I should get over it.
Here's the only example of where I like it: http://playericious.com/
No, but I will try to get some more information on that.
His html example for the 3 column layout is subpar anyway. The wonderful advantage of CSS is that I can create a multi-column layout where the html might put the content div first and the nav last, if I have a reason to do so. My underlying html structure doesn't need to be in any particular order in order to achieve the layout that I want.
He completely misses the fact that CSS2.1 has had display: options to do table-like alignment for years. These are well supported in modern browsers, except for IE6 and 7.

I completely recognize this is an argument of "what should be" versus "what is". As it stands though, I have been doing this for years and have never, never EVER needed to use tables for layout purposes. I get that some people are more interested in writing applications and just don't have to time to learn all of the idiosyncrasies that go into dealing with cross-browser display problems. However most of these are easily overcome, most without even needing CSS hacks.
I get down voted because their php site leaks memory? Nice.
I worked for Wal-Mart (via Sam's Club) from 98-2001, and it was certainly like this that entire time. And from what I knew from the friends who worked there from the late '80s, it hadn't changed much.

If there was ever a time when Wal-Mart wasn't as good a place to work as it is now, it was before 99% of their current employees started.
What urban America got for its subsidy was the food you claim can be raised in urban areas

It is not just me making the claim: http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/TCHAR0...

At the current efficiency of PhytoFarm, the entire present population of the world can be supplied from a square area about 140 miles on a side - about the area of Massachusetts and Vermont combined, and less than a tenth of Texas. This represents only about a thousandth as much land as is needed for agriculture at present (give or take a factor of four; for illustrative purposes greater exactitude is unnecessary). And if for some reason that seems like too much space, you can immediately cut the land space by a factor of ten: just build food factories ten stories high, which should present no more problems that a ten-story office building. You could economize even more and build a hundred stories high, like the Empire State Building or the Sears Tower. Then the surface area needed would be no more than the space within the corporate limits of Austin, Texas, to pick the first alphabetically among the many U.S. cities large enough.

PhytyoFarm techniques could feed a hundred times the world's present population - say 500 billion people - with factory buildings a hundred stories high, on one percent of present farmland. To put it differently, if you raise your bed to triple bunk-bed height, you can grow enough food on the two levels between the floor and your bed to supply your nutritional needs.
A robot playing pong [video]
btw, on Digg too.
http://digg.com/programming/GOOGLE_FAIL_Don_t_Be_Evil_Slogan...

Digg it and help wake up the google techs asleep at the (off) switch. Still going on after many hours. Some people getting 60 sms messages per hour.
"He completely misses the fact that CSS2.1 has had display: options to do table-like alignment for years. These are well supported in modern browsers, except for IE6 and 7"

haha are you serious? What percentage of people are using ie6 & 7?

I think that layout shouldn't be that complex - lets be honest here we aren't building applications or anything difficult like that - we're layout out text and pretty pictures and CSS often makes this more difficult than it has to be.

That being said I still use CSS as often as I can for layout.
ChocTop - packaging and deployment of Cocoa applications
What's literally possible and what's economically and logistically feasible are not necessarily the same.

Would it be less expensive to grow food in Manhattan, or in rural America?
Not exactly. Most of the store layout comes down from corporate, where it is determined via a series of tests. They're truly amazing at optimizing sales by merchandising. Employees don't really choose what goes where.
Crackulous developer wants people to stop pirating his App Store piracy app
I hope that was intentional wordplay. If not, I'll just pretend.
There was an anecdote posted by someone here a while that showed Knuth isn't very comfortable editing Wikipedia -- after a lecture Knuth gave, someone was talking to him and Knuth asked that person to fix some mistakes on his Wikipedia page.

And I realize that per WP policy that is probably a proper thing to do as self-edits are frowned on, but that wasn't what Knuth was going for.
[video] The Next Digital Experience (zuck, chad hurley,etc.)
As for 1, it depends solely on price.

If it's say, like that? I'll probably buy a year. If it's more like $9.99 or more a month, then, I'll probably do it monthly to avoid that single large expenditure.
I'll tip my hat to the author for writing the first well-formed, non-ranting, description of why one should use Tables over CSS (that I've come across), though I'm sure with the amount of these people that are coming out of the woodwork I'm sure I'll end up seeing more...

I still feel the need to disagree with him though. This kind of mentality is counter-productive to the web moving forward - CSS can be a bit more difficult at points, yes, but 90% of the issues that are generally encountered with it stem from IE's horrific rendering engine. We've finally gotten to a point where IE's market share is declining, and with that CSS based development will only get easier.

On one last note, CSS is being adopted in more places than just the web - for instance, there's various projects attempting to integrate CSS into the GTK setup. If CSS was really that bad and unusable, do you think it'd be getting any further adoption at all?
Ask HN: Do You Hate the New Github URLs too?
A couple weeks ago, github started giving the urls w/ the commit id instead of "master" in all of the links on the site, basically forcing you into using them.

I hate them. They're long. They're ugly. They make it harder to see which file you're on from the url. THEY GO STALE!

Shouldn't it at least be an option?

I thought about a greasemonkey script, but I can't just always replace any commitid w/ master because sometimes I'm looking at a specific commit or something, and I need the commit id to be in the URL.

Github users, how do you feel about this? Does someone want to collaborate with me on a greasemonkey script (hosted on Github, of course) that replaces the commitid with master but knows how to differentiate and leave the commitid when it should be there?

Note: I know this reads a bit like a support ticket, but I wanted to see if other people dislike it too or if I'm just insane.
This seems unlikely given that it was a data problem, not a coding problem, which caused the issue. Do you routinely run unit tests after hitting the Upload Content button on the website? I'm guessing that is a no. (Now the act of writing a unit test for "/" as input might have caused a programmer to say "Hey, the specification says that if we upload "/" in this file, then the entire Internet gets turned off. The specification is insane. Can we fix it?" But ordinarily you probably wouldn't run unit tests after upload just like you don't run a test suite after hitting Publish on your blog.)
Feynman: Take the world from another point of view [vid]
Okay, so why isn't "Center" centered?

With the CSS, Top Center Bottom are all centered, but with the tables, they're not.

Edit: am I wrong? Why am I being downvoted? I'm on Mac OS X 10.5 Safari 3.2.1
Generally terms of service don't trumpet national laws.
Most sites also used a backend with their own templating functionality. Often, it's surprisingly simple for a programmer to change out the look of the site by tweaking a simple template.
"What the article really proves is that tables are not better than CSS."

Well, no. What the article shows is that, for layout, CSS has one of the same chief defects that people complained about for tables (content and presentation codependence), and that CSS doesn't even have the saving grace of allowing the content to be in the same order people read in (in Western languages, yes, yes), as tables do.
The procrast thing always seemed insanely odd to me.

Agreed. I imagine an ad, seen by a character in a Philip K. Dick novel:

"Noprocrast! The best way for current you to impose your will on future you, guaranteed! For the disciplinarian in all of us, at last, a ready and willing subject!"
Exxxactly. If it takes an expert to do CSS, it may be an indication that it wasn't created well.
Google's AJAX Search - Lock-in?  Keyword Data Only In Google Analytics?
This title is not meant to be sensational, I think this is actually a serious problem if they are using their position as the dominant search engine to force themselves into being a dominant stats package.

FTA:

Browsers do not include that data in the referrer string, and it is never sent to the server. Therefore, all referrals from a Google AJAX driven search currently make it look as if you are getting traffic from Google’s homepage itself. Now, while this kind of information showing up in your tracking programs might be quite a boost to the ego if you don’t know any better, and will work wonders for picking up women in bars (”guess who links to me from their homepage, baby!”), for actual keyword tracking it is of course utterly useless.
After many years of flailing from side-to-side of the css/table argument, I've found myself doing what the author talks about -- simple table for layout, css for everything else.

Keep in mind: there is more than css and tables in this equation. There is normally a backend involved, too.

If the programmer has made good decisions when creating the site structure, moving columns around should be fairly trivial.

Sorry, but with a very imperfect spec like CSS, keeping everything in the designers hands is impossible.

The folks behind the current CSS spec failed badly when it came to layouts. Even the newer specs aren't doing much better.

It's a shame, especially when we've had years of design to draw from, both in the traditional design world but also programmatic layout managers.
Here at SmartFlix we're pretty analytical about it.

When we're batting the idea around, we create a page in the wiki, and the first section is "rationale / analysis". In there we put the number of customers it will attract, or the plausible increase in revenue per customer (with some error bars), then calculate a value for this (a 5% chance of an extra $1 from each of X thousand customers = $Y). We also calculate the cost (we have a nominal price of $75 per engineering hour, and half of that for a design or marketing hour). If a project doesn't pay back its investment in a year, we don't do it. If a project does look to pay back its investment, we then rank order it against other projects to figure out which to do first.
If CSS at this level of browser support isn't working for you then you are doing it wrong.
just get leechblock for ff3...
> http://shouldiusetablesforlayout.com/

Why do I still laugh every time I see one of these? I always see it coming...
Google has said many times there is no duplicate content penalty. And Google actually can't read anything inside a frame, so there would be no content to duplicate anyway. Duplicate content is an issue, because you are letting Google decide which page is the most important. It is better to control for yourself which page you feel to be the most important.
Strategizing with Google's Keyword Tool
You were homeless? What's your story (if you don't mind sharing)?
Oddly enough, in a recent episode of 'Burn Notice', they caused all of the phones in an office to ring simultaneously in order to make their escape during a con. They presented it more as a PBX hack, but it does sound a lot like the security concerns you mention.
2 years?! feels like just a few months ago.
Basically, the value of the land to this type of person is less "I own the land" and more "I am totally free of any regulation other than my own". Which should let you predict who is most likely to want to live there.

That said, isolated communities in the US come pretty darn close to this already. There are any number of compounds in the Western states where the government takes a very don't-ask-don't-tell stance towards any number of generally applicable laws. The surprising thing for a lot of people with the raids on the polygamist compound wasn't so much that the government would raid if it suspected you were marrying off children but rather that it would take that much to get them to be interested in a township's internal affairs -- people often expect the government to be rather more omnipotent than it is or cares to be.
This is certainly off-topic, but I love even the insults this community generates.

At least he didn't call anyone out for VB...thems fightin' words.

Zing!
> 5) Yes, dictionary look-up in Chinese is very messy.

Sure you may try this dictionary: nCiku - Handwrite Characters.

As a native Chinese and a native speaker, I often check hard characters on this site, too. Like this:
http://www.nciku.com/search/zh/detail/%E5%9B%A7/159934
It doesn't matter if the logic behind using xhtml+css is flawed: the xhtml+css evangelists have so saturated the development world with their propaganda that I'm worried if I make an educated decision to use html 4.01 or occasional layout tables it will hurt me when potential employers, clients, or even the general webdev community review my code and think I don't know what I'm doing.

Does anyone else feel that way?
If he's paying taxes, he already has, now hasn't he.
What's the logic here? Aren't senior individuals more able to self-regulate?
From

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/you-dont-have-a-fo...

“Do you know what it means to sinter something? I didn’t; but the kanji are so clear: 焼結 “burn + join”.”

I could believe that because specialized vocabulary is transparently made of simple characters put together, there is much less of a jargon/terminology barrier, so those that become literate actually can read specialized language just fine. This is not true of English.
Blogger to write 15 posts, each covering one chapter of Origin of Species
You're projecting your own personal issues onto large organizations.

The primary factor motivating any design over time is inertia. When were these sites started? What was the state of the art then? Who were the people that laid the groundwork for the site?

Google is unique in that A) they can hire top experts in any technology they want, and B) their homepage is extremely minimalistic and easy to change. So to suggest that Google does things out of frustration is just incredibly naive.

You didn't seem to get the point of my original post very well. Allow me to paraphrase a little more bluntly:

* You don't need to be a designer to do awesome things and succeed on the web.

* If you are a web designer and you don't know CSS inside and out, then you are a hack whose skills are already obsolete and sure to become moreso quickly.
I upvoted so more people would be exposed to the lesson.

Author's perceived deficiencies in language were actually deficiencies in author's knowledge of that language.

Humbleness, you proly need more of that.
Have fun seeing your SEO go down the drain.

Also there are tons of CSS frameworks which do enforce layout semantics, possibly even better than tables ever could.
When I made the site I debated whether to include frames or not. The justification I used was that I as a user (not just the creator of the site) would actually want a small toolbar that would allow me to navigate quickly between aggregated sites (it aggregates image sites, so I tend to move quickly between pages), and view the sometimes funny captions people give the images.

I can understand your annoyance though. Content creators should have a choice whether to be framed or not... and they do, but like you said not a lot of people know about framing sites and/or how to break them.
Just checked. Mine is fine too...
Yes. I want noprocrast on while I'm in lab or doing homework, but I want to be able to override when I'm done.
"except for IE6 and 7"

So it doesn't work for the majority of browsers, yea, that's a technique I really want to count on.
It would probably work, but then, you're creating a work-around for a CSS shortcoming with javascript.
1. Do I find it interesting? If it woke me up from my sleep or prevents me from sleeping, because I am so interested in working on it - it's time to work on that idea.

2. If not that extreme - is it worth losing X months of work on my current project. When I set code aside, I can rarely every just jump back into it. I tend to rm -r and start all over. So, is this new idea worth those 6 months I spent on my current project?

3. If not - it goes into Backpack in order of "excitability" and I'll get to it eventually.
I forgot that python's sets and strings are also collection types. (IMHO, enumerate's handling of sets is odd, but ....)

[And yes, I fumble-fingered "Just like you can with dicts." above.]
What's the Best Business Model for Newspapers?
Well, think about Backpack. It made the transition from being a personal data manager to being an "Intranet" platform.

If you had charged a lifetime fee to start, and then done all of the work to make it the new Backpack, how do you convince your users that even though it has the same name, and same look, it's worth purchasing another license.

Seems like a premium way to lose users and have the blogosphere come at you Frankenstein style (burning torches and all).
"Do your own research (and looking at the table counts of Alexa Top 100 sites doesn't fucking count as research, FYI)."

Yes. Yes, it does count as research. When you see people who have done what you want to do, looking at how they did it is likely to guide you in how you should do it. That doesn't always work, but it's a damn fine start.
I like the feature, and the override.

Sometimes I pull up the site and it gently reminds me that I've spent a lot of time reading it lately.

Other times it's the weekend or I've left my window open for a while (is this how it works?) and I'd like to get back to the site. I've disabled the feature for now since there's no override.
I'm not arguing that it's not copyright infringement. I'm arguing that it's not theft.
Okay... this isn't digg. We all know what happened, we've seen it everywhere else.

This isn't interesting to the HN community unless it tells us how the subversion of the cable system was committed and how Comcast is working to prevent it.
I start it, and then see how it's going a few days in. If it's a struggle then it either probably isn't something I want to be working on, or there's something wrong with my premise that's keeping me from really "feeling it." So back to the drawing board -- or I put it aside for something else. Sometimes, I'll revisit something I've previously set aside because I'll have thought of a new way to do it or new spin on it that makes more sense and makes me more excited to work on it.
It would be nice if they implemented the naming of commits as well, into their URL scheme. Of course, master would always work, but for instance - if you named a commit 'user-profile-complete' then you could use that within your URL as well.

I'm still learning Git, so sorry if "naming" isn't the appropriate term for this feature. I've only used it when following tutorials and screencasts introducing Git.
Layoffs mean more than lost wages for H-1B visa holders
A brief review of Wikipedia leaves my opinion unchanged.

Care to detail?

(I mean, yeah, there's a lot of fairly uninteresting stuff about how selfish people are and such, but whether or not he realized that, that also just fiddles around with "when" the catastrophes happen, not "whether". My summary rather gives him the benefit of the doubt.)
Agreed, I think the poster may have meant well (hacked feed) but in this case the word "hack" doesn't really describe what the article is about. The story here is about outrage and perhaps some shock/humor of the situation, which is not what "Hacker News" is about.
Very few friends use encryption, so full e-mail encryption is out. For a while I tried just signing my e-mails with a PGP cert, but I gave up when friends & colleagues kept asking why they couldn't open the attachment or what that attachment is ...