Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-flexbox-1] Proposal: add flex-direction-based aliases for the align/justify-* props (#6514)

I am not keen on this idea for a few reasons.

As @ByteEater-pl says in the thread, this adds an additional burden, as we will end up with both things out there.

It also further encourages people to think of Flex and Grid as these wildly different things. A lot of what I've tried to do in teaching people how to use these layout methods is to show how straightforward it is to switch a component from one thing to another. You don't have to feel tied to flex or grid, if you realize the component is really a grid you can change the formatting context but everything else, in many cases, works the same way. We lose that if we then have these special aliases only for flexbox.

I have something of a theory that the confusion within the existing community is based on how people learned these layout methods, first encountering flexbox and believing these properties were just for flexbox, then encountering them in grid. Teaching beginners, I start with grid and teach alignment in grid, then show how and why it is different in flexbox. This seems to work quite well in giving people a broad understanding. I'm sure they still have to look up when to align and when to justify, but having learned it in a systematic way it isn't baffling. I think we would make it more confusing by introducing these new properties that do the same thing but only in one context.

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Received on Friday, 13 August 2021 19:48:40 UTC