Re:Why is CSS the way it is?
by btown on Thursday July 23, 2020 @10:11AM
(#23927537)
Counterpoint: I think that if we'd solidified flexbox or grids too early, before people started making full-fledged single-page apps with toolbars and sidebars and panels oh my... we might have easily missed crucial use cases, and the "anti-table war" turning into the "anti-flexbox war" might have shattered the ecosystem. And the inevitable "display: flexierbox" to fix the shortcomings would be a recipe for disaster. With such high bars for backwards compatibility, it's good that we moved slowly.
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That's not a valid counter point.
Tk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tk_(software) ) first appeared in 1991. It predates the web. It had efficient and powerful layout managers from the start: http://zetcode.com/gui/tcltktutorial/layout/
The web basically offered... nothing. It just ignored everything else going on.
Not denying there was plenty of innovation in the layout manager space. But it's very possible that the standards committees for browsers weren't looking to those for inspiration at the time, especially before Gmail showed what was possible. Of course they might have done everything right, but just noting that hindsight is 20/20.
These kinds of layouts were incredibly common on the web by late 90s already. I remember wondering back then why all the desktop UI frameworks (it wasn't just Tcl!) have such flexible and powerful layouts, but HTML/CSS does not, even though it would obviously help solve a very common need.