Just goes to show how much the far left and the far right has influence over our society

Eh, it's pretty easy to get things not on the far side of the screen; it's just hard to get it precisely in the center.

Center something vertically :). Or even better, create three divs, arranged horizontally, with a different amount of text such that all the divs are the same width and height. Note that you cannot specify a height for the parent since the text may be of arbitrary length. Makes me sad every time.

Sure, table layout is how you'd have to do this. To me this shows that half of HTML/CSS happened because of legacy issues and not with deliberate thought. The semantic web is mostly dead other than to help Google parse out their own ads while CSS remains a mess full of hacks like this.

There was never anything wrong with the table layout algorithm, what sucked was that there wasn't any way to apply it without typing your HTML rigidly to that structure. The situation still isn't perfect and flexbox is a strange alternative that I'm not quite happy with yet, but you can't deny that the HTML in my example represents the content you described with almost no extra layout fluff.

Fair enough. Perhaps this wasn't the best example.

should be easy with flexbox (crossbrowser possible)

simple demo: http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by-flexbox/demos/vertic...

He was being punny...

I'd say its more like, using OpenGL ES to manage your render buffers and textures ..