[Oduig]

If you ask me, a layout language should have simple orthogonal concepts in it. The reason CSS gets so much hate is, in my opinion, a lack of coherence, a lack of modularity and terrible naming choices.

You only have to look at vertical centering to see the problem. Situations that look almost the same require entirely different solutions, often causing a change to ripple through to parent/child/sibling elements.

[TabAtkins]

Yup, that's the problem with having a language that evolved slowly over 20 years, while its problem space changed enormously. CSS was originally intended as a simple way of styling text documents on the web.

We're trying to fix vertical centering, at least. The alignment properties from the Align spec <https://drafts.csswg.org/css-align/> do consistent centering (and other alignment) across layout modes. Currently they only work in Flex and Grid, but they're defined to work in Block and Abspos as well.