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Comment by bobthedino | Hacker News Reader

Layout management: I do wonder sometimes how much awareness the HTML/CSS/JS community has about how layout management is handled in things like Java's Swing or Apple's Auto Layout - or do people think that "desktop style" UI layout management is the "old way of doing things", and obviously HTML/CSS/JS is much more modern and therefore must be better?

I don't think it is better, to be honest, and so I also wonder why people aren't crying out for decent layout management for the web - is it just lack of awareness of how good things could be, or...?

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> I also wonder why people aren't crying out for decent layout management for the web

They have been, and that's why today there are things like flexbox[0] and grid layout[1]. It just took a long time for the browser vendors/standards bodies to be convinced and then spec these things out to work within the confines of the existing layout models.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Flexibl...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_La...

Can't help thinking that Visual Basic had a better layout manager than CSS. I hate fixing CSS issues with a passion. I watch a designer whip up something in Illustrator and can't help thinking that CSS & HTML are a primitive way to do layouts.

Smalltalk had a GUI based approach to design in the 70s on a 2 mb disk, and most web layout is generating html & css, then tweaking that stuff. It doesn't feel like web layout is a progression.

Interestingly, Visual Basic did it all with absolute (pixel-by-pixel) positioning. Some (not all, but some) of the issue is that we have moved forward in what we expect out of UIs. (The rest, of course, is that the Web front-end is a shitshow of epic proportions)

The largest barrier to good layout on the web is that you can't measure text. All you can do is measure a node that has a specific text, which takes a long time and includes a reflow, which means either a) abysmal performance, or b) an entirely async layout algorithm, which would be much more complicated.

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