Comment by varispeed
3 years ago
Many years ago, probably 20, I went on a task of implementing a web browser. I remember I gave up at rendering tables. I couldn't wrap my head around on how to properly size them. It has become extremely complex quickly to address edge cases and I eventually gave up when I couldn't understand what's going after having a two weeks break. Probably if I had money and was able to commit full time I could eventually get it, but I had to focus on commercial work and putting food on my table.
edit: it's a great article! But nothing on rendering tables :-)
> Many years ago, probably 20, I went on a task of implementing a web browser. I remember I gave up at rendering tables.
HTML 5 effort has cleaned up a lot of behaviors and specified how browser tags should behave. So it is, possibly, an approachable task now. Still daunting though.
Tables are still not that clean! But luckily tables are way way less important than they were in the past, so much so that browser differences in table rendering leaves most pages readable.