[eterm]

Are you dismissing this article because you consider it too trivial?

Getting elements to align nicely in CSS is a real pain point for a lot of developers. The popularity of layout frameworks is also evidence of that. It's not trivial to take a design from balsamiq or photoshop and replicate it in CSS. Tricks such as this can make it a lot easier to do with CSS rather than relying on javascript tweaks.

I've seen functions attached to window.resize which are principally there to resize a whole bunch of elements dynamically so they still fit together well on a new layout.

[jjar]

If you're replicating a design based on the "Draw a picture in Photoshop and use the crop tool a lot" thesis, this is probably why you're having to use CSS tricks. Starting from markup first, and then considering styling, makes your life a lot easier.

[eterm]

And if I were building a site myself, that's how I'd work.

Unfortunately people outside the software development team don't think in markup, and they're the ones from whom the requirements often come.

Even more technical users often base their designs on the worlds of desktop software, or type-setting, or desktop publishing, or a myriad of other domains where "I want these two boxes to always be the same size and aligned to the bottom of this third box, and I'd like the font size to fit across the resultant size" is a perfectly reasonable request.

We can't keep going saying "Well the web doesn't work that way, you're going to have to rethink how you think about sizing" all the time, eventually the web has fix itself so that sizing and aligning fits better with how a lot of other domains work.

Flexbox is a step in the right direction but it's not a complete solution. (And we're still supporting IE9, so we can't even use that yet, thanks Vista!).