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Comment by Aardwolf | Hacker News Reader

So CSS can do 3D, but still not vertically center multiline text in a straightforward way?

Flexbox, or display: table-cell.

These have been supported for a while now – you're not going to get old browser support, but they're not going to support 3D features either, so your complaint is either flame bait or ignorance.

> These have been supported for a while now

For Safari still the -webkit prefix is required which is a bit odd

The world is a cruel place :)

Safari is the new IE. No idea why they still require vendor prefix for a range of accepted and implemented standards.

Webkit keeps prefixes usually because it is not implemented fully and it is an experimental feature. They began unprefixing flexbox in Sept. 2014, I don't know when it's gonna ship.

Though, its super unfair that the Web Inspector in Webkit uses unprefixed Flexbox (http://trac.webkit.org revision 173707).

Aren't you comparing the capability to do 3D with the straightforwardness of vertical centering, though? Certainly CSS has the capability to do vertical centering of multiline text, and I wouldn't call the 3D rendering strategy in this experiment amazingly straightforward---in fact, the cleverness of the technique is one of the things that makes this experiment so cool.

something wrong with flex box?

no IE8 and IE9 support...

Even Google doesn’t support those anymore…

Why would anyone want to use/support those browsers. First off their IE... secondly they're seriously out of date.

Tell that to the boss

If you're the developer that's your job to tell that to your boss. Come up with analytics to support your findings, make your case, he's probably not going to be reading this thread and staying up to date on all the latest and greatest that's your job. He may be stubborn or you might find out that your user base is all IE6 I don't know but sitting around complaining isn't going to get you anywhere either :)

Come up with analytics to support your findings

Analytics are irrelevant when you're writing some huge internal service for a company whose conservative upgrade policy dictates that only one older browser will be installed and used company-wide until God-knows-when.

By the way, glancing at a few browser market share websites, it looks like IE8 and IE9 are alive and well, totaling around the same as IE11.

Lol I am hardly "sitting around and complaining." At my last agency gig we had to support down to IE6 for several months until we built a strong case to only support down to IE8. Even still it was much harder and protracted battle than it should have been.

My fancy looking website doesn't have to look good on somebody's office computer. If they had a good firewall, it would probably be blocked anyway. Also, people still on old IE are used to seeing websites all busted up.

You meant "Only Google doesn't support those anymore..."

If you want new features, you cannot expect old browsers to be supported, that's just the way it works.

Fallback for IE8 and IE9, display: table-cell; vertical-align: middle; Note that the element needs an explicit height for this to work...

You should not center things vertically.

True story. Too many hacks are needed for that: http://css-tricks.com/vertically-center-multi-lined-text/

Anyways, centered stuff is evil! http://uxmovement.com/content/why-you-should-never-center-al...

This article isn’t about vertically-centered text but horizontally-centered text. You don’t expect the starting place of each line to change with vertically-centered text!

centered 'stuff' is not evil. Centered blocks of paragraphs are not as pleasing to look at and are harder to work around with the rest of your content elements making up the design. But he's talking about centering it from top to bottom: vertically centered. Which is not evil but would be a very easy thing for CSS to just do in all browsers. yet it can't seem to accomplpish it. Every 'rule' can be broken when done effectively. another expert will tell you that only a minority reads our paragraphs of text anyway. And another expert will tell you that the harder it is to read something the better the comprehension will be.

If clean lines really solved the worlds problems, we'd be in much better shape by now.

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