Open any actual complex software from Photoshop and Cubase and weep https://x.com/dmitriid/status/1424052288205856773
There's a reason all the CSS frameworks endlessly recreate the same dozen-or-so trivial components and never dare touch layouts.
An assignment that I had that they always seemed to enjoy was picking a stadium scoreboard (I initially forced Fenway park but loosened it up in later years) and recreating it responsively exclusively in html markup and hand coded CSS (JS only allowed to pass arrays). Had to go through all 3 major media queries.
That assignment was in week 4 out of 15. 95% of the kids came in with no CSS knowledge at that time.
If you learned CSS through the aforementioned frameworks that abstract it into a mishmash of barely recognizable selector abbreviations I totally understand why you would think that it was complex and unapproachable. But once you understand positioning and the box model selector by selector sky's the limit.
Blame bootstrap for the nature of today's HEADER ROW BLOCK BLOCK BLOCK ROW BLOCK BLOCK ROW state of web design. CSS has very little to do with that.
Edit: sorry for the run on sentences.
The one that has two big numbers and two team names? That big complex layout?
Photoshop is a strange pick too. The extension layer was CEP, which is literally Chromium, and UXP that replaced it ships flexbox. There's a browser version now as well.
No negativity, but I feel biased towards CSS ;)
There's also Cubase behind it ;)
> Photoshop is a strange pick too. The extension layer was CEP
As we all know, Photoshop is just the extension layer.
Edit. And when they started moving to more and more web tech, they couldn't even get the most trivial of the app's layouts correctly: https://unsung.aresluna.org/photoshops-challenges-with-focus...
Nothing in that post complains about layout. It's all regressions in usability.
What you are referring to as "layouts" is not what everyone else is talking about. In the context of this entire thread "layout" is the algorithms which decide the size and position of UI elements.
You can literally see the screenshots in the post
> In the context of this entire thread "layout" is the algorithms which decide the size and position of UI elements.
And yet the apparently amazing layout algorithms in CsS haven't lead to people easily creating actual complex layouts, and all CSS frameworks re-implement the same dozen or so trivial components.
The few companies that manage to do something complex do that at gereat expense and over untold man-hours of engineering.
The thread you linked kind of touches on that, too, by pointing out that sometimes you need to drop down to handling layout+rendering yourself. Doesn't matter if it's a desktop or web app. It is actually the best option to do sometimes because it can be less hacky and more performant.
And if you try to layout this many elements, the browser will just sit down and cry.