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Comment by camerondaigle | Hacker News Reader

Good grief, if the element to be centered has a fixed height and width, then there's nothing to this. I've been using the negative margin method for years:

http://jsfiddle.net/mBBJM/2155/

Not that it's any less Stockholm-Syndrome-y than the linked article's solution, but still, I have no clue why this is on the front page of HN.

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Front-end stuff always seems to make the front page of Hacker News. I think it's because front-end is easier, and possibly more "hip" right now (as far as jobs go), so there's more interest in it.

I'm a full-stack engineer that started out on the front end. I don't think frontend is easier - in terms of the amount of background you need to know to produce something useful, being a frontend engineer is significantly harder than being a backend one. However, frontend stuff demoes better. If you do a fancy machine-learning analysis of some public data set but present it as a command-line app or a table on some bare-bones website, people will be like "Uh, what's the deal?" If you make things fly around the screen in cool patterns, they'll be like "Woah! I didn't know you could do that!"

A lot of this is also because a frontend engineer's job is to lower the cognitive processing a user has to do, while a backend engineer's job is to come up with useful things to cognitively process. In other words, when a backend engineer comes up with a demo, they make the viewer work to understand it, while when a frontend engineer does the same they make the viewer go "Ooh! Aah!"

Fair enough. This seems like CSS Positioning 201 to me, but I've been dealing with this stuff for a long time now, so my perspective is probably pretty skewed.

I completely agree with your point re: cognitive processing: good CSS communicates intent to the reader, so if this kind of stuff is unclear to people and the Smashing Mag post helps the concept click in readers' minds, then it's a win :)

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