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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

Sweet. I figure only 15 more years until we get two column layouts working, and then we'll finally be able to publish like it's 1979.

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CSS multicolumn layout is four years old. It's implemented in all the major browser engines, and many popular sites like Wikipedia use it. http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-multicol/

Only partially. You usually have to use browser prefixes to get it to function. http://caniuse.com/#feat=multicolumn

Add Autoprefoxer in your build process and never type them again.

Or use Bourbon mixins (http://bourbon.io/docs/) if you use SASS.

SASS mixins are great, but Autoprefixer is better for prefixes: it looks the same as writing actual CSS (just with no prefixes) and has no cognitive overhead during editing. Compare the Bourbon mixin:

    @include background(linear-gradient(red, green) left repeat);

to autoprefixer:

    background: linear-gradient(red, green) left repeat;

AAAAaaand we're back to 7 solutions to a simple problem

How so? Autoprefixer allows you to just write spec CSS and let it worry about prefixes.

That is not CSS anymore, it's "CSS + autoprefixer". Which, I agree, is great, but it's worth mentioning. Vanilla CSS requires the prefixes, "CSS + autoprefixer" doesn't, but it requires other things like an extra build step (and a build process, at all). Worse, it could be mutually exclusive with other tools.

When you advocate an add-on to an existing solution, you're changing the solution. It's like people who recommend typescript in reply to JS's lack of types, or Coffeescript to its ugly syntax: you can't have both, they change the original thing. Or vimperator with firefox, or vim-mode emacs, or... it's all not the same thing anymore. You push the carpet down in one place, it comes up in another.

CSS still requires the vendor prefixes. If autoprefixer is the perfect solution to that, let's stop people everywhere from using vanilla CSS and switch them over to "CSS + autoprefixer". Turns out it's not that easy, which gives the original "but it requires prefixes" argument more meat.

That's not a solution; that's a workaround.

Like I said, "working". I don't want two columns stretching ten feet long. I want two columns on this page, two on the next, two on the one after that...

That is indeed how multicol works when combined with pagination [1].

[1]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-multicol-1/#pagination-and-overf...

I'm pretty sure flexbox can solve two column layouts very well, just not with one continuous piece of text.

It would seem there is less than 92% support for flexbox yet.

Better go back to print, then.

So fall back to display: table for the garbage browsers. This is not difficult stuff.

Hm, had you said 1978, I would have gotten the reference (Spoiler: TeX, though maybe not really 2-column at the time?). Did you have something specific in mind when writing 1979?

"Did you have something specific in mind when writing 1979?"

Probably the Prince song "1999" (party like it's 1999...) combined with the general era in which this stuff was figured out in non-web digital contexts.

1984 with the introduction of the Macintosh, would be a better year to have picked, as it could be considered the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution.

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