I’ve been building sites since around 2000 and I’ve used HTML tables a lot (including for page layouts, remember those days?). There was a time when I thought I was fluent enough to not have to look up HTML or CSS docs for most things. But I don’t think I’ve ever actively used the DOM API that this article mentions so I learned something new today.
Surprised, as we used this a lot around 2005, when IE6 was still dominant.
If was much simpler to build tables in javascript with this rather than using document.createElement.
Perhaps this was one of those things that you just had to know about, or be working on data heavy web apps.