Wow CSS is unfriendly, you really realise how poor it is once you learn other layout systems (android's XML and iOS auto layout, etc).
Wish there was another standard that could co-exist side by side on the web, something simple enough to be implemented reliably by the browser vendors.
> Wish there was another standard that could co-exist side by side on the web, something simple enough to be implemented reliably by the browser vendors.
That standard exists. It's called flexbox. It was designed to solve exactly this problem (among many others), and does.
That said, as I never tire of mentioning, vertical centering was a part of the design of CSS 2.1. The technique is called "absolute centering". See CSS 2.1 10.6.4 [1]: "If both 'margin-top' and 'margin-bottom' are 'auto', solve the equation under the extra constraint that the two margins get equal values."
Nothing happened to it. It gets used by front-end developers every single day. I personally can't follow the CSS complaints. It is easier to learn than any other front-end dev language in one's toolkit.
Yeah, everyone did a really bad job of evangelizing absolute centering back in the day, leading to lots of angry Web developers and awful hacks like the inline-block/vertical-align trick. It should have been the first example given for "position: absolute"…
Exactly. I haven't done HTML layout since circa 2000. I tried WPF about 8-9 years ago and well, it was just simple to get layouts right. I'm sure there's some reasonable reason for it, I just don't understand why browsers couldn't do similar, or just rip off WPF.
as someone who's done both (and web) -- Android's XML layout is easily the best of Android, iOS, and web, while iOS's AutoLayout is a complete mess that basically only works because there are still so few iOS screen sizes. Android coding in general is a pain compared to iOS, but they definitely got the declarative layout system right.
iOS developer here. AutoLayout is definitely not borderline magic, and some people hate it.
It is inefficient. It is awkward to set up in code, so many people write their own syntactic sugar around it. It crashes hard when it isn't 100% sure what to do with its constraints. Working with multi-line text is still a pain, so you often run into clipped text on iOS if you dare to increase the font size. etc.
Anonymous downvoters, AutoLayout may work great for you, but it is definitely controversial among iOS developers (more so than e.g. ARC). Nothing wrong with pointing that out.
Wish there was another standard that could co-exist side by side on the web, something simple enough to be implemented reliably by the browser vendors.