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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

Many people learned CSS before these functions were available. So, it's a newer, simpler way of doing something known.

If someone is using CSS for living, they must know these basics as they come out. Also, browser compatibility is a thing.

As someone who used to live and breath css, but has been out of web development for about 6 years now, I find info like this awesome.

CSS display: grid existed since 2007, flex since 2009. If people are not using box model with CSS, I wonder how they are using it. Box model of CSS is "hello world" of python.

I said I didn't mean to be cocky. It just makes me think people don't even touch CSS because if I publish an article saying "this is how you print hello world in C" people wouldn't care.

But none of this is about the box model.

Tell that to people who use margin and padding to align objects in CSS.

Between 2007 and 2009, Internet Explorer 6 was still a thing. It was incredibly daring on YouTube’s part to put up a “Internet Explorer is deprecated” banner back in 2009; it had to be done without official approval. [1]

In 2011, “display: table” was cutting edge; we finally had few enough IE6 and IE7 users that it was practical to pull off, albeit with “” hacks.

I still had to deal with IE-specific bugs like the fact webfonts didn’t work in IE8 when put in an IFRAME — but did work in IE9 when rendering in IE8 mode. This wasn’t limited to IE: Safari had a bug where you couldn’t legibly print a page with webfonts on them, requiring a Safari-specific hack to disable webfonts in the print CSS.

Professional web developers were not using stuff like “display: flex” or “display: grid” in production until the late 2010s, when Edge and Chrome was finally reducing the number of Internet Explorer uses to a sane level.

[1] https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

> grid existed since 2007, flex since 2009.

These two only existed theoretically. For anyone actually earning a living with the frontend they didn't exist because:

- grid kinda existed in IE, but not in other browsers. Well, you could build a site that only targeted IE, but in 2007 this was already being really frowned upon and out of vogue.

When grid was finalized, it was a different version of the spec, not entirey compatible with IE's. Chrome and Firefox only got grid in 2017.

- flex was only partially supported by browsers until 2012 when it was fully supported, but behind a prefix. Full support without a prefix only appeared in 2013.

I mean, I love the fantasy world you have constructed, but there are people who actualy do frontend and do actually remember the anciaent histroy of checks notes the past 10 years or so

From where I sit, here in late 2021 it has just become finally possible to use “Display: Grid” [1] on a real world site. Microsoft has finally configured IE11 to force a website to open up in Edge if the patched IE11 decides the site is not IE compatible; I just need to learn how to make my site refuse to open in IE11 (opening up in Edge instead) to use “Display: Grid”.

I really wish Display: Grid was practical to use back in 2009. It would had been a lot more straightforward than the “Display: Table” stuff I did instead.

[1] https://caniuse.com/?search=Display%3A%20Grid

> From where I sit, here in late 2021 it has just become finally possible to use “Display: Grid”

Indeed. There's a reason caniuse lists browsers all the way back to 2009 or so :D

There's a great spectrum of people between "using CSS for living" and "has never touched web development at all".

So yes. This is useful to significantly more people than you imagine.

Well, there is a response above you to my reply, he is saying he never used display grid or flex and used CSS for living.

He said, literally, "used to live and breath css, but has been out of web development for about 6 years now"

I added emphasis so you don't twist other people's words in the future.

Thanks for the emphasis then.

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