alt Hacker News> It is funny how we keep asking more and more and more even though we already have it so much better than before.
I've been developing web stuff for 15 years now and sometimes I can't believe comments like these. We didn't have it "so much better before". CSS sucked hard and getting things right for three devices was an incredible pain in the ass.
Tables have semantic meaning. They don't support fractional units. Reflowing for mobile is impossible and you need JS hacks like splitting tables. You can't reorder natively.
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I saw a similar comment on HN recently that CSS was "better" back in the day and what we have today is either unnecessary or too hard.
I reminded that person we had to use floats and positioning hacks and abuse HTML tables for page layout before flexbox and CSS Grid were created.
There was no way simple method to center a div!
Tbf it said “we have it so much better Than before” I think they agree with you
I have been developing web stuff for 20 years now and I also can’t believe comments like these.
Flex and grid enable layouts that are far beyond anything we could do with table layouts. Anyone who claims otherwise has obviously not done any amount of serious, production FE UI design and development.
Are there bits of DX ergonomics I’d like in flex and grid? Of course. Does the syntax sometimes feel a bit arcane? Yeah. But the raw power is there, and anyone who claims the contrary is either a gormless backend developer, or some troll who is trying to design things in MS Word.