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.
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.