Comment by bryanrasmussen

>Give an rgba color to rows and nth cells (columns).

that sounds like a use for tables, so I find it difficult to imagine a non-table layout that would want this.

>Resizing columns by size of cell content.

I can sort of see this as a requirement for non-table layouts that would not work well, however my experience from table time was that was one of the biggest irritants at least for me, that columns would haphazardly resize based on what was in them, and sometimes you wanted them to and sometimes not. As a general rule I found it better design wise to truncate text rather than have things expanding and contracting in response to what copy editors were doing.

>framesets are here to stay now

woo yeah, I see them a lot in the wild. I mean really the only time I really see frames used anymore are iframes and generally in eCommerce and similar security requiring solutions where the frame can be partially controlled by the storefront, but is more fully controlled by the payment provider. I just find the statement "framesets are here to stay now" really weird and triumphal for something that is so rarely used?

>I still have one of the funnier "how to make this without tables?" challenges.

I followed the link, I would think it is better suited to a "why would you make this" challenge. I'm not sure

1. it shouldn't be a table. seems like maybe it should be

2. why the freaky animation. or for that matter why the animation nearly crashed my browser.

I'm definitely sure lots of designs could not be adequately achieved without tables and framesets, but my experience seems to have run contrary to yours because for me CSS was a godsend in fixing the things I found irritating about those two technologies, this does not mean that I never encountered situations where I thought this would be easier with tables, but as soon as I tried putting tables back in I found all those irritants came back in.

From my experience tables and framesets were best suited to layouts that are rarely ever wanted, and when used to implement slightly different layouts had too many problems and irritants to be useful.

Your mileage has obviously differed, but I'm not sure that "here is a particular problem that people seldom wish to solve and which I have constructed, that plays to the strengths of my favored technology while avoiding its pitfalls" is as impressive an argument as you seem to think it is.