3 ms·

This problem was solved literally decades ago with <center>. I appreciate why that HTML tag was deprecated but I also completely sympathise with why people scof

This problem was solved literally decades ago with <center>. I appreciate why that HTML tag was deprecated but I also completely sympathise with why people scoff at the complexity of doing the same thing with CSS.

nicoburns 3y ago
<center> only centers horizontally which has been easy with CSS for years. It only gets tricky when you also want vertical centering.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  this blog post and subsequent discussion is literally just about horizontal centring! I’ve been building websites longer than most (since 1994 in fact) and centring in CSS is definitely not as easy as it was with the <center> HTML. Not even close. If it were, there wouldn’t be this entire discussion to begin with. I swear the amount of times topics like this come up and yet a small subset of developers, likely Stockholm syndromed into believing things are great, is ridiculous. The sooner people like yourself pull your head out of your arse and realise that the current status quo is unacceptable, the sooner web standards finally mature into something that doesn’t have more footguns than the worst of C and worst of Perl combined.
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    > this blog post and subsequent discussion is literally just about horizontal centring! It’s not. Did you read past the first example? It goes into vertical centring from “Centring with flexbox” onwards.
    - hnlmorg 3y ago
      ok, half the article and most of the HN discussion is about horizontal centering. Either way, the point is still valid regardless of what percentage of the article was focused on something that should be trivially discoverable to even the casual web developer.
JimDabell 3y ago
The <center> element is extremely limited and can’t centre things in most of the ways described by the article.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  I agree. However <center> (or rather a hypothetical CSS equivalent) would still more than good enough for a considerable number of common use cases. It's perfectly reasonable to ask a particularly language to make the easy things easy while still being powerful enough to make the hard things achievable. When it comes to CSS, or even web development in general, that isn't often the case. This discussion demonstrates that point too. We're long overdue a redesign in my opinion.

nicoburns 3y ago

<center> only centers horizontally which has been easy with CSS for years. It only gets tricky when you also want vertical centering.

hnlmorg 3y ago
this blog post and subsequent discussion is literally just about horizontal centring! I’ve been building websites longer than most (since 1994 in fact) and centring in CSS is definitely not as easy as it was with the <center> HTML. Not even close. If it were, there wouldn’t be this entire discussion to begin with. I swear the amount of times topics like this come up and yet a small subset of developers, likely Stockholm syndromed into believing things are great, is ridiculous. The sooner people like yourself pull your head out of your arse and realise that the current status quo is unacceptable, the sooner web standards finally mature into something that doesn’t have more footguns than the worst of C and worst of Perl combined.
- JimDabell 3y ago
  > this blog post and subsequent discussion is literally just about horizontal centring! It’s not. Did you read past the first example? It goes into vertical centring from “Centring with flexbox” onwards.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    ok, half the article and most of the HN discussion is about horizontal centering. Either way, the point is still valid regardless of what percentage of the article was focused on something that should be trivially discoverable to even the casual web developer.

JimDabell 3y ago

The <center> element is extremely limited and can’t centre things in most of the ways described by the article.

hnlmorg 3y ago
I agree. However <center> (or rather a hypothetical CSS equivalent) would still more than good enough for a considerable number of common use cases. It's perfectly reasonable to ask a particularly language to make the easy things easy while still being powerful enough to make the hard things achievable. When it comes to CSS, or even web development in general, that isn't often the case. This discussion demonstrates that point too. We're long overdue a redesign in my opinion.