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I can't speak to Interface Builder, but in VB 6 Hooking resize was SO easy, and the math you do inside it was so easy, too. It took maybe 5 minutes to do almost any layout.

It was frankly, a shock to see how easy this model was and then see the monstrosity that came to pass for HTML and CSS positioning. Baffling.

Everything you just listed was easy in VB 6 IMHO (well, touch wasn't a thing exactly).

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Having done a few such forms in the past, it was easy enough for a simple dialog with a list, two buttons and a text field, but it quickly got unwieldy.

Which was okay back in the day. Everyone had low display resolutions, so simply scaling a window's controls when resizing was okay. No need for responsive layout and even too fancy layouts, I guess. But what we got later with anchor in WinForms, layout panels in WinForms or WPF, layout managers in Swing, and CSS layout die help reduce the math you'd have to do yourself, especially for more complex layouts or even when the layouts change due to different requirements.

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