[rosslh]

Your comment is some interesting food for thought, but I wanted to respond to a couple statements you made:

> not being able to center text no matter how much frontend experience we have

Not being able to center things is a bit of a meme, but flexbox was introduced back in 2009 and has been supported by major browsers for quite a long time. Centering text and elements is now extremely easy.

> css could benefit from knowing about the dimensions of container elements

You're in luck! Container queries were added to CSS fairly recently:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_contain...

[bravura]

As someone who has struggled with getting CSS to do normal layout stuff that had clear precise semantics but required weird CSS trickery, it's actually more scary than lucky that stuff like container queries have arrived 30 years after CSS was introduced.

I agree with GP that CSS should be scrapped.

[asddubs]

container queries have a very obvious chicken and egg problem if used a certain way: If this container is less than 30px wide, make its content 60px wide. Otherwise make it 20px wide. Now that container exists in a quantum state of being both 30 and 60px wide. I actually haven't looked into container queries to see how they ended up dealing with this yet.

Obviously this is a very contrived example but it can also express itself in subtler ways.

[mixmastamyk]

Comeau has a piece on that. Another property to constrain it is the solution.

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/container-queries-introducti...