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I feel your disdain! I'm an old-timer and remember complaining about using those new-fangled cascading style sheets instead of just putting everything in html tag attributes.

And don't get me started about having been forced to use div's for layouts instead of tables. In fact, I still don't understand why the html table construct couldn't have been evolved to accommodate a layout role.

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What is funny, both grid and flex still fail at some use cases. For one, grid is unaware of “media print” and cannot paginate itself (that was a big facepalm after an hour of preparing). It is also 10k rows/cols max by definition, 1k max by a common implementation. Can’t style gaps too. Otoh, flex is non-tabular, so you cannot simulate both with just one. I also met some trouble with inner flex scrolling (“overflow-xy” hierarchy forwarding issues), but these details I forget as fast as I meet them.

The entire css thing is overly situational. In a generalized model, any problem is solved by a finite set of building blocks. In css, any problem except few premodelled ones is a pile of hacks and worms that never get back into a can.

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