Re: What happened?

Forwarding to the CSSWG, because this also and mainly relates to CSS.


I understand your frustration, but then again the CSS WG defined proper aligment for block elements in the CSS Flexbox and CSS Grids specifications, the first one already being implemented in all recent releases of evergreen browsers. 


You could still blame the browser vendors for taking so long, but I can assure you the CSS WG regularly use white boards to make drawings, that they care about good feature design, and that they look for real use cases like newspapers, magazine, and real websites. 


The issue, as far as I understand it, was not that centering was “forgotten” or deemed too complex per se but that the layout modules inherited from HTML and refined in CSS were not adpated to it, because they were aimed at inline documents, not complex web application layouts. It took some time to make this diagnostic and find ways to fix the situation, but I don’t think we can blame anybody for this.











De : Mark Reese
Envoyé : ‎lundi‎ ‎9‎ ‎décembre‎ ‎2013 ‎10‎:‎04
À : HTML W3C WG






Hello, 




We are in the year 2014 and there is no clear, simple and intuitive way of centering elements in HTML/CSS.

This is absolutely ridiculous and unacceptable. It is unacceptable for users to have to spend hours trying to figure out how to center things. Deprecating tags such as <center> is a mistake.. You have deprecated simplicity and ease in favour of complexity and difficulty. You wanted to create something more flexible but ended up causing trouble.




If you, and entire consortium of software engineers can't do it, then I'll do it myself. Things 

such as centering are fundamental, meaning that they should have been established once and for all, a 

very, very long time ago, back in the years when HTML existed only in design form.




I also advise you very strongly not to rely on a community of developers, that is a mess. Gather a team of 

developers that have a talent for simple, clean, minimalist and intuitive design; this is the future.




What's more, your organization is too large and its structure grew to something like a small society. I 

suggest you rework the structure of your organization and make it small and simple, complexity only slows 

and complicates matters. It renders work inefficient and acts like a barrier to progress; most of the work becomes bureaucratic in nature. At this rate, if you do not follow this suggestion, you'll eventually have to create a policing department who's job is to oversee adherence to bureaucracy. Your work seems to have shifted from developing HTML/CSS to trying to be organized. There is a compromise between organizational level and productivity.




Finally I suggest you adopt a philosophy of taking the time to do things right, and do them right the first time. Go back to the drawing board, and design from scratch if you need to; make sure you address this any and all fundamentals, incarnating them into something simple and intuitive, once and forever. When designing a language, always design it in a way that would simplify and facilitate the work of a programmer. Intuitive design wins everyone over. The rule of thumb is that if a programmer needs to spend more than 5 minutes figuring out how to do something, particularly something fundamental, then there's problem.




Thank you,

- Mark