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Doing layouts on the web has always been hard, but it seems like we’re getting a better option to do it now.

First, we had tables for layout, and while semantically incorrect, with proper nesting and other tricks, we could build fairly functional layouts with them.

Then along came floats which most of the people are using today. We can use any element we want to, but floats aren’t really for the fainthearted. On surface it seems pretty basic, but the complex functionality behind can make seasoned developers look dumbfounded at their screens. Also, one of the downsides with floats is needing to clear them through extra clear elements or, better, clear CSS floats without extra markup.

Downside with that, though, besides from it’s not that easy to grasp floats, is that we need various trickery to support equal-height columns, since there’s no default way to set up a relationship between elements with floats.

Then some people have started using display: table, display: table-cell etc, but since support took so long to get in Internet Explorer (IE8), people seemed to give up on it and just accept floats as the de-facto solution.