Incomplete list of mistakes in the design of CSS

I will never understand the bizarre scene of the web's smug collective declaration that tables were dead and not to be used juxtaposed against the years it took to regain the ability to reliably center things. Assuming one agrees that we even did regain it.

Related: I also love when I can't paste tabular data into Excel/etc. anymore

For the record, I don't hate the idea of stylesheets, but...sheesh

> I will never understand

I think it's fairly easy to understand if you understand what it was a backlash against. Tables today are used sensibly, for the most part, but the pre-CSS world was truly absurd in its table use.

The reaction may well have been over-the-top, but it wasn't disproportionate given the state of table usage at the time.

CSS's initial forays into layout seem bad today because people think of tables in terms of their intended use (not the now long-gone monstrosities the community actually extracted from them), but in comparison to the previous ecosystem, floats were a relative godsend.