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Comment by jsgo | Hacker News Reader

that's really nice. Looking at level 3, why is -start inclusive but -end exclusive? start = 1, so it isn't zero-based, that I get, but if it starts with 1, it looks like it would end with 3, but 4 is the answer (1 and 3 only sets the first two columns).

I get that that is CSS, not the game's rules, so not arguing why the game handles that way, I'm just curious what the motivation is for the CSS rule.

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When you use numbers, it's referencing the lines between sections, not the sections themselves. So a grid of 4 columns will have 5 line numbers.

I found this a strange decision in the Grid standard design. Surely most people* would think more in terms of "cells" that "cell-dividing-lines". Then again, compared to the design decisions in much of the rest of CSS including every other standard layout mechanism this is a fairly small gripe, overall CSS Grid is a big improvement. And when using the excellent "grid-template-areas" (compared to ASCII art elsewhere in this thread) you don't really specify start and end points anyway.

* By people, I mean designers (used to bootstrap-style grids), coders (used to arrays) and everyone else (used to spreadsheets).

But in this case you have 1,2,3,4,5 and start 1 end 4 selects 1,2,3. So it appears inclusive 1, exclusive on the 4 to me. If it were like some instances of substring where it is (index, count), I could get that, but it almost reads as "start right here, end right before this."

Actually, wait. Thought on your line numbers a bit and I'm thinking that points to each vertical line as a number (so in this garden's case, 6 per row). I just plugged it in as that and it follows. Just feels foreign to me as I'd do start/end 1 for just first cell, start 1 end 2 first two cells, etc. I'll get accustomed to it though. I wonder if there are other scenarios that followed the same logic in CSS that I just didn't attempt to really grok. Thanks for pointing it out.

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