I remember building really complex layouts w nested tables, and learning the hard way that going beyond 6 levels of nesting caused serious rendering performance problems in Netscape.

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JimDabell a day ago | parent | next [-]

I remember seeing a co-worker stuck on trying to debug Netscape showing a blank page. When I looked at it, it wasn’t showing a blank page per se, it was just taking over a minute to render tables nested twelve deep. I deleted exactly half of them with no change to the layout or functionality, and it immediately started rendering in under a second.

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shomp a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Six nesting levels for tables? Cool, what were you making?

	▲	chrisweekly a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Upromise. com -- a service for helping families save $ for college. Those layouts, which I painstakingly hand-crafted in HTML, caused the CTO to say "I didn't know you could do that with HTML", and was served to the company's first 10M customers.
	▲	chimeracoder 20 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Six nesting levels for tables? Hacker News uses nesting tables for comments. This comment that you're reading right now is rendered within a table that has three ancestor tables. As late as 2016 (possibly even later), they did so in a way that resulted in really tiny text when reading comments on mobile devices in threads that were more than five or so layers deep. That isn't the case anymore - it might be because HN updated the way it generates the HTML, though it could also be that browser vendors updated their logic for rendering nested tables as well. I know that it was a known problem amongst browser developers, because most uses for nested tables were very different than what HN was (is?) using them for, so making text inside deeply nested tables smaller was generally a desirable feature... just not in the context of Hacker News.