I'm not sure what your point is. Web standards have had a turbulent history? Of course that's true.
- CSS 2 was originally published as a recommendation in 1998. CSS 2.1 was pushed as a recommendation in 2011. Maybe something was wrong?
- "Ignored by vendors" is a bit of an understatement, because your "close to 20 years" includes 5 years of the vendor with 90% marketshare not releasing anything at all.
- FWIW, what became flexbox was useable (assuming polyfills aplenty) in Firefox and Webkit browsers 5 years ago[1]. It took some time to standardize, but while frustrating in the present, it's ok to take time to make sure the spec works, because it will be (in theory) around for quite a while.
> It makes it 'easy' by introducing yet another weird box modelism that doesn't really fit anything else that's already there
What many people don't appreciate about layout in general (and WRT to the web, dynamic layout in particular), is that it turns out to be difficult (and sometimes extremely computationally expensive) to implement an expressive layout system that does what we intuitively think it should. A good example is word wrapping, which is easy to tell when it "looks right" (at least to a trained eye), was done by hand by many when printing was done more manually, but turns out to be difficult to assign a metric that handles all use cases, especially when you're trying to be computationally efficient.
Web layout is like a whole set of word wrapping requirements, expected to get along and paint a page in real time. The process that birthed CSS is nowhere near what you'd turn to if you wanted to develop a cohesive styling whole, but it's how history usually plays out. If it's any consolation, I personally don't think there's a comprehensive theory of everything for styling anyways, so there are always going to be aspects that need to be learned, not inferred.
In any case, flexbox is pretty straightforward if you spend an afternoon with it, just a constraint-based layout system that maps pretty well to how you would describe a layout like that.
Well yes, that is exactly my point. It's not like the desire to center things vertically came about a mere 5 years ago, it was a thing that people were doing in 1996 when CSS was first propagated.
I don't really get your point. You seem to be arguing that people shouldn't have been frustrated for the last 17 years by CSS' inability to do basic and non-novel tasks simply because it's starting to become possible now.
My post may have been confusing because I was addressing two different things, the standards process and the merits of flexbox's design.
> You seem to be arguing that people shouldn't have been frustrated for the last 17 years by CSS' inability to do basic and non-novel tasks simply because it's starting to become possible now.
The standards process is frustrating. For the CSS working group in particular, there was until relatively recently a stubborn clinging to monolithic CSS standards even with nearly a decade of evidence that holding up everything people agree on until people agree on everything is not a winning strategy. That's how you end up with being unable to center a div for so long.
Flexbox's particulars aside, however, my point is that there is a difference in kind, not degree, between "trying to express this in CSS makes me want to murder the universe" (the case in 2008) and "this thing does not work in a browser from 2008" (the case today). If your point is that it's taken a ludicrously long time to get there, I don't think you'll find anyone to disagree with you.
- CSS 2 was originally published as a recommendation in 1998. CSS 2.1 was pushed as a recommendation in 2011. Maybe something was wrong?
- "Ignored by vendors" is a bit of an understatement, because your "close to 20 years" includes 5 years of the vendor with 90% marketshare not releasing anything at all.
- FWIW, what became flexbox was useable (assuming polyfills aplenty) in Firefox and Webkit browsers 5 years ago[1]. It took some time to standardize, but while frustrating in the present, it's ok to take time to make sure the spec works, because it will be (in theory) around for quite a while.
> It makes it 'easy' by introducing yet another weird box modelism that doesn't really fit anything else that's already there
What many people don't appreciate about layout in general (and WRT to the web, dynamic layout in particular), is that it turns out to be difficult (and sometimes extremely computationally expensive) to implement an expressive layout system that does what we intuitively think it should. A good example is word wrapping, which is easy to tell when it "looks right" (at least to a trained eye), was done by hand by many when printing was done more manually, but turns out to be difficult to assign a metric that handles all use cases, especially when you're trying to be computationally efficient.
Web layout is like a whole set of word wrapping requirements, expected to get along and paint a page in real time. The process that birthed CSS is nowhere near what you'd turn to if you wanted to develop a cohesive styling whole, but it's how history usually plays out. If it's any consolation, I personally don't think there's a comprehensive theory of everything for styling anyways, so there are always going to be aspects that need to be learned, not inferred.
In any case, flexbox is pretty straightforward if you spend an afternoon with it, just a constraint-based layout system that maps pretty well to how you would describe a layout like that.
[1] http://infrequently.org/2009/08/css-3-progress/