I know the web is not print, pages are not static, user screens vary and one shouldn't try to control everything bla bla bla, but it seems all my layout woes ul

I know the web is not print, pages are not static, user screens vary and one shouldn't try to control everything bla bla bla, but it seems all my layout woes ultimately boil down to difficulty in lining things up. That's what 'layout' means after all, isn't it? Aligning one thing with another, to show they're related. I'm not a classically trained graphic designer, but doesn't any explication of visual fundamentals include 'alignment' somewhere up near its top? Yet CSS really, really sucks at lining things up. Anyone designing a better system might do well to start with the notion of alignment as a basic primitive/operator. To be able to say, item A here ought to line up with item B there (and if not possible, predictable behaviour C results). My gut feeling is that one could then derive all other types of layouts from there. I admit that might be naive. Also, I realise that I've probably just described constraint-based layout, but as yet I haven't tested one of its implementations such as GSS in a real project.