Impressive Webs

> The thing that I can't understand is, why did it take SO LONG to get useable, proper, and intuitive CSS-based layout on web-pages?

Many reasons:

- HTML and CSS are not designed for anything complex.

HTML and CSS at their core are only meant to display a static page of text and some images in a single rendering pass on a computer from 1990s.

- Many decisions in CSS (especially early CSS) are one-off solutions that might not even have correct specifications compared to how people usually use it

Float is really a one-off solution for a very specific subset of layout. The standard box model famously has a default that no one in real world uses, and that IE actually got right. There are more: https://pavpanchekha.com/blog/css-problems.html and https://www.impressivewebs.com/css-the-bad-parts/

- Any solution has to be aware of any previous solution and mistake

Let's say, you introduce flex. How will it work with floats? What about display:inline or display:inline-block? Tables? Inside tables?

Let's say you introduce grid. All the question above plus all the questions on how it will behave with flex.

Let's say you introduce...

- Standards are mostly driven by browser implementors, who are not known for any/much of web work. Additionally, solutions have to be "fully complete including edge cases that maybe one person in the world cares about".

Cant' find the link for that, sorry, you'd have to take me at my word :)

- All that still has to work reasonably fast for some…

My primary frontend blog/website (https://www.impressivewebs.com/) is mostly passive, I post maybe one article per month, usually not even that much. The blog has been active for about 10 years, so I get lots of SEO traffic, which brings in about $400-500 per month.

I also sell ebooks that are compilations of articles and tips from my newsletter (see below) on Leanpub and Amazon. (https://leanpub.com/b/javascriptdombundle)

My main newsletter (https://webtoolsweekly.com/) is now also a regular income stream (about $400-700 per month and growing), but not exactly passive. Takes regular research, writing, etc. But it’s fun to do and leads to all sorts of paid tech writing projects.

Finally, my newest newsletter (https://techproductivity.co/) is not yet making money but that’s starting to change as the subscription number has started to rise to a decent number and it’s very easy to write that one, maybe 2 hours of work per week.

I was really into this, until I ran into:

It appears your browser does not support 8 of the CSS3 properties used by Alice.js. Please use a WebKit-based browser like Chrome, Safari or the PlayBook Browser.

I could not figure out exactly what those properties are. I am running FF9a2 which should support pretty much everything Chrome does. The big thing FF lacked until 5 was the keyframe animations.[1][2][3] So not so useful to the world at large yet.

It does look like a nice library otherwise.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/CSS_animations

[2] http://www.impressivewebs.com/css3-browser-support/

[3] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=435442

The tone of the article was surprising. The alternative boilerplate is far too simple to cut it as a boilerplate for people building even the most modestly sized sites. It certainly doesn't cater to the majority of professionals in the way that the HTML5 Boilerplate project tries to.

A previous article, Easy HTML5 Template http://www.impressivewebs.com/easy-html5-template/, also proposed an alternative boilerplate. But it clearly distinguished between what the HTML5 Boilerplate project is aiming to do, and why/when a simple boilerplate has its place.

I never implied that W3C Schools is related to W3C. But I do agree with you: that's bad. But for me that's a public secret. I don't think that's the main reason why I dislike W3C schools, though. My problem with W3C Schools is that they are not the right away to learn web development in a proper way: https://www.impressivewebs.com/w3schools-ugly-bad-good/. MDN holds a far greater standard on a whole lot of aspects: following exact W3C specs, being up to date, design, just to name a few obvious ones.