Life & Wisdom Quote by Mike Davidson

The most revealing part here is the casual admission: design isn’t only taste, it’s tooling. Davidson is talking about an era of web-building where the medium’s constraints didn’t just limit expression; they actively shaped people’s habits, aesthetics, and even their ethics about “good” code. “I vertically center things in tables a lot” reads like a confession from the transitional web: table layouts were officially frowned upon, but practically irresistible because they solved real problems cleanly.

The subtext is frustration with the gap between CSS’s promised elegance and its lived reality. Vertical centering is a famously mundane need, yet for years it was a minor boss fight. Davidson’s line lands because it exposes how small missing features metastasize into structural decisions: when divs can’t do something basic, teams don’t merely work around it on one page. They rethink entire layout systems, standardize hacks, write extra markup, add spacer elements, or retreat to “deprecated” techniques. That’s what “across the board” is really doing: it’s not about one misaligned box; it’s about culture, workflow, and the accumulated cost of imperfect abstractions.

As a writer in the web/design world, Davidson is also documenting a power struggle between ideology and deadlines. Standards evangelism says “use divs.” Production reality says “ship the page.” The quote works because it punctures the moralism of best practices and replaces it with a more honest metric: what the tools actually let you do without contorting your entire process.