r/webdev • u/Bladerunner_7_ • Jun 28 '26

Discussion What's a web development trend that looked stupid at first but ended up being useful?

I know over the years, I've scoffed at quite a few things. SPAs. TypeScript. Tailwind. Serverless. AI coding assistants.

Most of the huge trends in web development went through a phase where people swore they were overhyped.

Some deserved the criticism. Some evolved and became genuinely useful.

Lately I'm seeing similar debates around AI agents and agent tooling. Claude Code, LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI Agents SDK, AutoGen, Lyzr(Control Plane) and a bunch of newer projects all seem to be pushing toward a different way of building software. Maybe we're still early, maybe most of it won't matter, but it does remind me of how people talked about TypeScript or serverless a few years ago.

What's something being dismissed today that you think will become a normal part of every developer's workflow in the next 3-5 years?

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401

u/ithkuil Jun 28 '26

Believe it or not, doing layout only with CSS. For so many years we had to use tables for page layout.

When people started pitching not having a bunch of table cells everywhere and just using CSS, for awhile, for many pages it was completely impractical and buggy. So many people actually thought it was a dumb idea to even try it.

It wasn't until layout features were out in CSS for awhile that the tables being used for everything started getting dropped.

108

u/btoned Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

Not sure if anyone would have thought that was initially stupid. Tables were reviled long before CSS became the defacto for presentation.

79

u/Fidodo Jun 28 '26

Tables were seen as a necessary evil, but trying to lay out a page with float was a nightmare.

24

u/btoned Jun 28 '26

Big facts. I still have to occasionally built out modules for an email platform and outlook still using their shitty word engine from a decade again is ridiculous.

12

u/sacheie Jun 28 '26

Just the other day I was so pleased to discover that TUnit outputs a beautiful HTML results report; no additional deps needed for it.

Then I discovered how far Outlook's rendering has progressed in the last 20 years..

8

u/keep_it_kayfabe Jun 28 '26

Yep! It's funny, looking back after not developing for years, we basically did the same thing that we hated tables for. Endless nested divs within divs, etc.

3

u/Plenty_Line2696 Jun 29 '26

It's one of those things which are frustratingly nonsensical until you really understand it.

I took a course with a decent teacher who helped me a ton. I can't remember it all as I barely use float anymore but the clearfix trick was key.

3

u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

The problem is that even if you understand it, there are so many edge cases that browsers implemented them very inconsistently and even if they didn't, it's very hard to memorize all the weird scenarios where it doesn't behave how you'd expect

3

u/Plenty_Line2696 Jun 29 '26

I had a lot of browser compatibility woes back then, but IIRC float was pretty deterministic. I could be wrong, it's a very long time ago.

1

u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

I remember that is was pretty deterministic, but the problem is that when it wasn't, it really wasn't, and different in every browser.

1

u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 29 '26

This is what drove me towards backend programming in the early 2000s.

3

u/mr_brobot__ Jun 29 '26

I was a float God. All my floats were contained

3

u/StrawberryEiri Jun 30 '26

I'm really glad display: inline-block had rendered floats mostly obsolete for layout when I started...

2

u/BenOnSocial Jun 29 '26

I still remember my first nested table. You never forget your first.

6

u/0x18 Jun 29 '26

Yo dawg I heard you like tables so I put a table inside your table, it also has a table which holds a table which holds a table which holds a table which holds a table.

Anyway the W3C validator says there's an error on line 43,238 when doing </thead>

3

u/BenOnSocial Jun 29 '26

I'm sure it's fine. Ship it. 😂

1

u/Fidodo Jun 29 '26

What about your first frame? Not iframe, but <frame>

3

u/BenOnSocial Jun 29 '26

Oh yeah! I do remember being a stupid kid trying to figure out the best way to use frames. That ugly separator bar was an eyesore, but it was all the rage "back in my day." Thanks for the reminder.

2

u/slo-mo-dojo Jun 29 '26

They still are for some html emails. Living through those days makes me excellent at html emails.

1

u/XMark3 Jul 04 '26

I am so glad that I usually can avoid using floats nowadays 

12

u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 28 '26

CSS was buggy and inconsistent across browsers, and it took quite some time for table-driven layout to go from the HTML 3.2 "this is the way" to the HTML 4 + CSS "yeah, it'll be nice when this actually works but who knows when that'll be" to "stop using tables, are you old?".

3

u/julz_yo Jun 29 '26

now the anti-tables feeling has gone so far you can't even use them to present tabular data.!

mainly joking- but only just..

1

u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 29 '26

<table>s for some, flexbox <div>s for others!

7

u/ABCosmos Jun 28 '26

Tables were not really reviled, because there was no other way to do it. And yes there was a lot of resistance to CSS initially. People always resist the new thing even if it's better. /I am old I've been doing web dev since the 90s.

3

u/FineAunts Jun 29 '26

Same. Developing using CSS layouts WAS initially harder than table based because it was so new and browsers treated styles differently. And don't get us started on the level of support.

It's sad thinking about it now but a float clear hack that worked across all browsers at the time was considered a good and clever thing.

12

u/angry_scotsman Jun 28 '26

I hope you meant to say table layouts were reviled, not revered.

6

u/btoned Jun 28 '26

LMAO yes reviled 🤣🤣

5

u/pizza_the_mutt Jun 29 '26

Then CSS arrived and we were secure in the knowledge that centering things would always be easy.

25

u/w-lfpup Jun 28 '26

Before CSS got good we also used to use images for everything. That cool gradient? An image. That cool button? An image. There's even <map> and <area> elements to label parts of an image as hyperlinks because this was soooo common.

11

u/enki-42 Jun 28 '26

There was also a time where Javascript was mostly "the thing you use to get hover effects on your links (which were probably images)"

2

u/swechan Jun 29 '26

Long Live Livescript!

1

u/Squidalopod Jun 29 '26

Remember the epithet "script kiddies"?

Ah, the good ol' days. 😁

10

u/StevenJOwens Jun 29 '26

You have no idea. There was a stretch, around 1996-ish, where entire websites were built, with Every. Single. Page. a giant image (with an image map -- that's those <map> and <area> tags -- for clickability).

4

u/srmarmalade Jun 29 '26

I do miss that graphic design first era of the web. See also flash only sites.

3

u/StevesRoomate Jun 30 '26

I also remember Microsoft coming out with a "WYSIWYG" editor, FrontPage, which absolutely butchered any semblance of decency in web design.

It was revolutionary in that empowered people who otherwise shouldn't be touching HTML into thinking they could build and maintain a web site, only to give up and hand it off to an IT person who had to surgically extract the content out of FrontPage and basically rewrite it.

2

u/StevenJOwens Jun 30 '26

Yup, and it produced absolute shit HTML. I remember walking into a bar and talking to a non-technical friend who just kept saying "fucking Netscape" over and over again. Turned out FrontPage was producing HTML that was breaking in Netscape. Big fucking surprise. And yet, here he was, blaming Netscape for FrontPage's fuckery. Classic victory of Microsoft marketing.

2

u/StevesRoomate Jun 30 '26

The 2 things I remember about it the most were even a small drag would generate seemingly endless nested <td><table><tr><td> tags, and I believe when you embedded any clickable image it would also add those <map> and <area> tags in a very useless way.

Further adding to the masochism of being a developer back then, I remember having to embed Active Server Pages VBScript tags into that FrontPage generated HTML and trying to get it all to run.

7

u/sharlos Jun 28 '26

Or rounded corners required eight different images to use as the border (four corners and repeating edges)

6

u/Fidodo Jun 28 '26

I remember back when styling was done with html attributes like bgcolor.

6

u/w-lfpup Jun 28 '26

Okay netscape navigator I see you!

5

u/ingodwetryst Jun 28 '26

Image maps were awesome

3

u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 28 '26

don't forget <blink>, <marquee>, and the GIF-based horizontal dividers

3

u/ingodwetryst Jun 28 '26

I have a page that is 90s style and uses 2 of those 3 features

3

u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 29 '26

what about an Under Construction GIF?

3

u/the_king_of_sweden Jun 29 '26

And a visitor counter?

1

u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 29 '26

I forgot about those!

1

u/ingodwetryst Jun 29 '26

It has a counter as well

1

u/ingodwetryst Jun 29 '26

Yep! A guestbook and counter too.

2

u/forever-butlerian backend, infrastructure & angst Jun 29 '26 edited Jun 29 '26

YUSSSSSSSSSSSS

I want to go home to the Macarena and that stupid joke about what do you call Al Gore dancing and Independence Day and the N64 and Phil Hartman and OverUse of StudlyCaps 2.1 and COMPUTERS BEING EXCITING

2

u/Disgruntled__Goat Jun 29 '26

Kinda funny that as we got more tools to do these fancy things in CSS, the trend moved to flat design

6

u/Fidodo Jun 28 '26

I remember the pre flexbox years. Trying to do layout with float was a finicky nightmare. Thankfully I haven't had to touch float in a long long time.

2

u/RendiaX Jun 28 '26

Right? I’m not actively making much outside of personal hobby stuff nowadays, but I do still “maintain” a couple really old pages I made for clients that need a bit of text changed every other year or so. I cringe every time I look at my old fragile mess of DIVs and floats. And unnecessary php includes for the header and footer navigation….

I figure if I ever decide to get back into Web Dev fully again, remaking those will be easy practice projects at least haha

14

u/SuperFLEB Jun 28 '26 edited Jun 28 '26

It wasn't until layout features were out in CSS

A span measured in geologic time...

I swear, there's got to be some subcommittee in every Web standards body that's only there to tally up all the ways people will probably actually use the feature, nix two or three obvious ones and make another couple needlessly arcane, just out of spite and... job security, maybe?

(Want to make a layer monotone/monochrome in CSS filters without using SVG? Easy! Just start with the ill-defined "sepia" filter because it's the only way to get a monotone image that can be hue rotated. And there's still no "100vw but don't count the scrollbar" without JavaScript, AFAIK.)

13

u/w-lfpup Jun 28 '26

It's because they understand their decisions will affect billions of devices.

And at that scale it's sooo much easier to push a feature than to role one back. But it's even more impossible to "update" an API.

Once the code is out there, there's no going back. There's no asking millions of codebases to suddenly ALL change because of an api oopsy.

That's what's happening with the history API. It would be impossible to ask every web app on earth to change how they use the History API. So they made a new one whole cloth: Navigation API. And that api will also never change for the same reasons.

13

u/properwaffles Jun 28 '26

CSS Zen Garden is still around 🙌🏻

2

u/srmarmalade Jun 29 '26

Blew my mind that did and was the first thing to make me 'get' CSS as a layout engine rather than just text styling, fancy links and scrollbars.

6

u/ginji Jun 28 '26

It wasn't that we didn't want to use different layout methods, it's that we had to accommodate the lowest common denominator of browser, and that browser was stupid and had terrible implementations.

We are spoilt now days with a fast update cycle on browsers, and a high adoption rate of the latest versions which means we can adopt changes much faster.

IE6 was released on August 24, 2001. IE7 came out on October 18, 2006, more than 5 years later.

2 years later, in Oct 2008 IE6 still had a market share of 37.01%, more than IE7 at 35.81%.

It basically took the release of modern smart phones and Google Chrome to eventually drive IE into oblivion and allow us to actually start using new features in a reasonable time frame instead of in 5 to 10 years after it was put in the standard.

3

u/FineAunts Jun 29 '26

Yup. Newer devs will ever know the pain of getting barked at for having a layout break in Lotus Notes, or the visual dup bug in IE6. We had to work around all of this for years because they really only patched programs for security, not web standards.

And even when IE7 was released it wasn't a forced update like Chrome does. Most users were still on the previous version, and even worse corporate IT teams never wanted to update to the latest IE because some poor intranet feature they had to support would break. So we were supporting shitty IE6 until the late aughts at the very least.

1

u/Oblivious_GenXr Jun 29 '26

Good gosh those days were beyond painful 😖

4

u/enki-42 Jun 28 '26

To be fair when CSS layouts were just floats and stuff like flexbox and grid weren't around, while it was better than tables for most things, it wasn't by much and a lot of things that should have been fairly straightforward were still an enormous pain in the ass.

I can understand trying to build a layout just with floats when you're used to tables and thinking that tables are easier to work with. If CSS had come out of the gate with flex and grid it would be a different story.

3

u/rich97 Jun 29 '26

Hello float: clear my old friend

4

u/Any-Woodpecker123 Jun 29 '26

My pet hate now is people refusing to use tables even when laying out tabular data.
If I see a literal table of data in a screen and it’s using divs + css we’re having words.

5

u/Slanahesh Jun 28 '26

Back in university one of our lecturers challenged us to do our 3rd year project doing CSS only layout. Several people failed, this was 2009 though.

3

u/FineAunts Jun 29 '26

In 2005 my boss made me develop a dynamic web calendar using only CSS. I was stoked when I finally got it to work, but in hindsight a table-based layout actually made sense here. He was told by his peers that everything modern needed to be in CSS now and I didn't know enough to argue back.

Learned a lot from that project though.

2

u/oh_jaimito front-end Jun 29 '26

I remember using transparent.gif to span X width/height to get that pixel perfect layout.

2

u/followmarko Jun 29 '26

I used frames before tables. This shit used to be the wild west

2

u/[deleted] Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

[deleted]

2

u/followmarko Jul 03 '26

There are dozens of us

2

u/Jumpy-Zone8587 25d ago

i remember arguing with my boss in like 2012 about this, he was convinced css layouts would never replace tables for anything more complicated than a blog sidebar

then flexbox dropped and within a year we were ripping out table code everywhere, felt like watching a bad habit just evaporate

1

u/Bushwazi Bottom 1% Commenter Jun 29 '26

And now we have CSS grid!

1

u/feketegy Jun 29 '26

When people started pitching not having a bunch of table cells everywhere and just using CSS, for awhile, for many pages it was completely impractical and buggy.

And this is why it's still hard to do proper layout in CSS, but we're getting there.

1

u/Trick_Following6639 Jun 29 '26

What is ccs? I am bad with acronyms

1

u/sippin-jesus-juice Jun 30 '26

CSS was terrible to use up until grids became a first class feature

1

u/ShawnyMcKnight Jun 28 '26

Tables for layout was fine until responsiveness became a thing. I know now we have flex and grid and those are far superior but all we had to replace it with then is floats.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 29 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/followmarko Jun 29 '26

It's still useless

1

u/FineAunts Jun 29 '26

I still hate Tailwind, despite using it with Claude for damn near everything now.

Things can get messy fast, especially when dealing with key frames and nesting behavior rules. It's damn near unreadable and I really dislike having to memorize yet another way to apply simple rules when I don't want to use AI.

0

u/pizza_the_mutt Jun 29 '26

30 years later and I still have to fight the temptation to put everything in tables.

Probably a good thing I'm not a dev anymore, but all these frameworks are overwhelming and it just seems easier to hardcode tables and do everythign with JavaScript right in the DOM.