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"...the amount of hackery that goes into making webpages look the way web designers want them to is astounding." I totally agree. For example, the CSS box mode

"...the amount of hackery that goes into making webpages look the way web designers want them to is astounding." I totally agree. For example, the CSS box model sounds so simple and elegant at first, but when you add dozens of styles and elements to your page, the interaction between different styles can quickly become horribly messy no matter how disciplined you are with your CSS code. Beyond a certain number of styles, CSS inheritance turns into a black art. CSS simply doesn't scale well for anything beyond relatively simple pages. A huge part of designing web pages is layout and spacing and yet positioning and spacing elements remains ridiculously messy and convoluted (even with CSS3). You could also argue that tools like SASS and LESS are in effect sticking-plasters for inadequacies in CSS. I know hindsight is a wonderful thing, but if we were designing CSS today from scratch, I think it would be designed very differently.

babby 13y ago
CSS could be redeemable if; the box model defaulted to box-sizing: border-box;. If vertical-align and margin: auto (or variants) worked with variable heights and widths, and on all elements. If percentages of heights worked inside all elements. It seems like flex-box fixes a lot of this, but at the same time, it could be so much easier. You're right though. CSS would be so much different and so much more gloriously painless to use. I can even imagine a better styling engine allowing for applications like macaw, dreamweaver to actually generate properly good CSS and thus building sites with a GUI would finally be plausible.