alt Hacker NewsI'm not convinced about the "edge case" at all. CSS made it an edge case for no reason at all, and made a silly default out of it.
If the box isn't big enough to contain center-aligned text, of course it should spill on both sides, because it's both expected and consistent.
And now the author pretends "we left-align text and spill on the right" as the only possible default behaviour that somehow makes constraints impossible/extremely difficult.
If you don't make assumptions and weird defaults in your system, you don't have to fight them and make weird workarounds.
Replies
>If you don't make assumptions then when edge cases happen that have not been programmed for then the system will probably crash.
>and weird defaults in your system
I'm not sure that there is any sufficiently complex logical system that will never have weird defaults, perhaps caused by the logic of some other seemingly sensible default. Complexity being the root cause of this overarching phenomenon.
Layout can only expand/overflow to the right and down, not up or left. Although not fundamental, this has been a standard and useful design limitation in almost all software from the start: infinite drawing canvases are the only counterexample that immediately occurs to me. (“Pull to refresh” is almost another exception.)
I’ve seen sites that centred in a way that caused balanced overflow while assuming a wider viewport than I had. The result was a completely unusable site: the middle half was in-viewport (good), the right quarter was accessible by scrolling (poor), but the left quarter could not be accessed at all (abject failure).
> designers are, by necessity, going to rely on implicit knowledge encoded somewhere on what to do in edge cases
This seems to be implying that designers rely on quirks like the left alignment thing and not behave consistently... that seems like a crazy assertion to me.
And that appears to be the crux of the argument. A more general, consistent system wouldn't provide enough context for the browser to provide specific quirks, so instead a system with a different parameter for every single individual use case where quirks can be introduced to parameters individually is better.