Do You Know That There Is an HTML Tables Api?

I like to joke, "you think programmers are bad at naming thing, you should see the mathematicians, programmers are infants before the infernal naming sense of the common mathematician".

It's a brain scramble because you can't just read in toto.

Well, you can literally, but, you don't feel like you grok it.

And when you take a second pass you gotta slow down and stop and parse "what's r here? is it relevant? oh rows?"

It's one of those things that's hard to describe because it doesn't sound like much if you got it. And this example is trivial, especially if you're not open to the idea its a problem (r/c = rows/columns) But it's nigh-impenetrable in other scenarios.

You feel like you're barely understanding something that you actually might grok completely.

It takes time for the contrarian dynamic to work itself out (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), and once that happens, the original problem subsides but and the secondary problem (shallow objection to the objection) sticks out like a sore thumb.

It's usually enough to downvote (or, in egregious cases) flag a post that shouldn't be at the top. In really egregious cases, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is also a fine idea.

From the guidelines: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's a small critique, I'm sorry it got upvoted by other people.

In just 4 lines you have r, row, t, ri, l, i and c.

The full variables names are so short anyway that personally I'd write them out. Code does evolve and there's a risk of this suffering as a result.

Just look at how they salivate for WASM where everything is closed up and inaccessible, including a11y.

I dunno; ISTR that the materializecss library used `<a>` for buttons.

Aside: I started with Perl CGI scripts, then ColdFusion, and finally Classic ASP back in the 90s. I had a chuckle a couple years ago dealing with a younger developer who was shocked that and oldster like me was up on new-fangled SSR patterns.

If was much simpler to build tables in javascript with this rather than using document.createElement.

Perhaps this was one of those things that you just had to know about, or be working on data heavy web apps.

What is discouraged is using tables as invisible layout grids - and that was their primary de-facto usecase before CSS and grid layouts. But that had always been a hack, even though a necessary one.

Doing table-free multi-column layouts involved doing crazy “float: left/right + padding + margin” with an heavy sprinkle of IE6 clearfix hacks to work right. I mean eventually people dialed in the correct incantations to make table-free designs work for IE6 but it was never quite as straightforward or reliable as a good old fashioned table. Many megajoules of energy were wasted on webform drama between the pragmatic "fuck you, tables just work and I have shit to ship" webdev and the more academic "tables break the semantic web and aren't needed, use CSS." crew.

Like most things, the "tables are evil" mantra was taken too far and people started to use floated divs (or <li/>’s or <span/>’s or whatever) for shit that actually was tablular data! (I was guilty of this!).

And like most things, a lot of the drama went away when IE6 finally went away. People who weren't around back then simply cannot understand exactly how much IE6 held back modern web design. You could almost count on half your time being spent making shit work for IE6, despite the ever decreasing amount of traffic it got. I'm pretty sure I almost cried the day Google slapped a "IE6 will no longer be supported" on it's site.... the second they did that, my site got the exact same banner. Fuck IE6. The amount of costs that absolute pile of shit browser caused the industry exceeded the GDP of entire nations.

Anyway.... back to adding weird activex shit in my CSS so IE6 can support alpha-blended PNGs....

According to who?