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Comment by bonn1 | Hacker News Reader

> ... the objections you've raised do not support your view at all.

No reason to get emotional.

> That's a really pedantic objection —

Pedantic? Positioning elements is the most important feature of a layout system and CSS is totally broken in this regards, just try to vertical center something. Flexbox is godsend and finalized—every vendor removed the prefix. Wondering who is pedantic.

> Apple could easily just not have released WKWebView

The pressure they got for five years that they offer just the 10x slower UIWebview and give Safari the WKWebkit was the main reason and maybe they just released WKWebview to make the impression that they play along. This one bug makes WKWebview utterly useless.

However, would love to keep the tone in this discussion on a friendly level.

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> > ... the objections you've raised do not support your view at all.

> No reason to get emotional.

No reason to project tone onto text that made a simple statement.

Vertical centering has been relatively easy since CSS 2.1 (Table model); flexbox of course offers much more than that. Flexbox may be finalized and unchangeable, if only because so many browsers already support it unprefixed (as support for such properties is almost never removed) – however, like much of the CSS3, flexible box model is not yet a W3C Recommendation, and is, in theory at least, subject to change. With proper tools, a prefix here and there is not a huge burden.

The reason why many browsers rush to unprefix CSS3 is not that it's perfect, but because of the lazy web developers who only prefix stuff for WebKit. This may or may not bite the community in the future.

> Vertical centering has been relatively easy since CSS 2.1 (Table model)

But not with divs which are more common

…so you use table display rules on the divs?

It's not hard, really: just use absolute centering [1]. That's actually what "margin: auto" is there for in CSS 2.1; it's a shame they were bad at evangelizing it.

[1]: http://codepen.io/shshaw/full/gEiDt

Who is just prefixing stuff for Webkit? Mixin libraries have been pretty standard for at least three years, and now Autoprefixer is starting to do the heavy lifting.

People only initially prefixed for Webkit because webkit was the only browser that had a lot of these properties. The problem was that nobody went back and updated their prefixes, which really only further illustrates one of the big problems with the whole idea of vendor prefixes.

using display: table-cell; is a hack and has quite a few gotchas. However it was a very useful hack none-the-less for a feature which most designers would never expect would be such a challenge.

Flexbox is godsend and finalized

Flexbox is awesome and has been available to use in Safari for years. Prefixing is not an impediment to the adoption of web standards.

This one bug makes WKWebview utterly useless.

No it doesn't – it does harm PhoneGap/Cordova or whatever, but there are known workarounds, and this bug is likely to be fixed soon in any case (see http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/174029/trunk for the actual commit that adds the required support)

bonn1, regarding your issues with CSS and positioning, you may find the Fayde project interesting as it addresses the problem you describe. Ignore the part about silverlight as that is only a comparison -- but fayde does support rich applications in the browser without plugins, CSS, or HTML: www.fayde.io

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