> The thing that I can't understand is, why did it take SO LONG to get useable, proper, and intuitive CSS-based layout on web-pages? Many reasons: - HTML and

> The thing that I can't understand is, why did it take SO LONG to get useable, proper, and intuitive CSS-based layout on web-pages? Many reasons: - HTML and CSS are not designed for anything complex. HTML and CSS at their core are only meant to display a static page of text and some images in a single rendering pass on a computer from 1990s. - Many decisions in CSS (especially early CSS) are one-off solutions that might not even have correct specifications compared to how people usually use it Float is really a one-off solution for a very specific subset of layout. The standard box model famously has a default that no one in real world uses, and that IE actually got right. There are more: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/css-problems.html https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/css-problems.html and https://www.impressivewebs.com/css-the-bad-parts/ https://www.impressivewebs.com/css-the-bad-parts/ - Any solution has to be aware of any previous solution and mistake Let's say, you introduce flex. How will it work with floats? What about display:inline or display:inline-block? Tables? Inside tables? Let's say you introduce grid. All the question above plus all the questions on how it will behave with flex. Let's say you introduce... - Standards are mostly driven by browser implementors, who are not known for any/much of web work. Additionally, solutions have to be "fully complete including edge cases that maybe one person in the world cares about". Cant' find the link for that, sorry, you'd have to take me at my word :) - All that still has to work reasonably fast for some definition of fast, including all the weird interactions between mistakes and other workarounds of past, present, and future For example, Cassowary constraint solving algorithm for layouts was proposed in 1999, but was rejected because it was deemed too costly to process.