CSS has poor defaults, but you can't break backwards compatibility on the web. Check out this gist [0], which sets far more sensible defaults for flexbox. I too

CSS has poor defaults, but you can't break backwards compatibility on the web. Check out this gist [0], which sets far more sensible defaults for flexbox. I took it from css-layout, which was later renamed to yoga [1]. Everyone I've convinced to try it out has told me that they found it much more intuitive. It makes things work the way you'd expect them to! I'd be genuinely interested in hearing about your experiences with other layout and styling languages or tools, and what you like about them. I used to hate on CSS a lot, but eventually changed my view and grew to like it, and I think given its history it's actually quite good. I haven't had much in-depth experience with native alternatives, but when I've tried em out I usually found they each have their own shortcomings. For example, on macOS I'd say Auto Layout is certainly easier when getting started, but as soon as you want to create your own components from scratch it becomes rather challenging. As for styling a container based on what it contains, if you know of any examples which showcase good execution of this idea I'd also love to check em out. I know of at least two proposals / libraries which are attempts at tackling that problem in CSS; take a look at CSS-Element-Queries [2] and EQCSS [3]. [0] https://gist.github.com/cesarandreu/3e87cb6993bedeb162b5648222eb67bf https://gist.github.com/cesarandreu/3e87cb6993bedeb162b56482... [1] https://github.com/facebook/yoga https://github.com/facebook/yoga [2] http://marcj.github.io/css-element-queries/ http://marcj.github.io/css-element-queries/ [3] https://elementqueries.com/ https://elementqueries.com/