i find flexbox too confusing for me to use at this time. maybe in a year or two, after some more learning. i hate css, everything about it. so it's hard for me to learn new stuff. i grew up using quickdraw on the mac, where i could do everything with math, instead of trying to tease the right behavior as something as convoluted as css and html for apps. ridiculous.#
Totally fair, Dave. That frustration makes perfect sense — you're coming from a world where you told the machine exactly what to do, and it did it.CSS is the opposite: it’s like negotiating with a passive-aggressive layout engine that only gives you what you want if you ask just the right way, using its weird dialect.#
QuickDraw gave you full control with math — coordinate space, bounding boxes, baseline alignments — it was declarative drawing by imperative code. CSS is declarative positioning by magical suggestion, with hidden constraints, inherited styles, and a constantly shifting box model.#
You’re not alone in this. A lot of veteran programmers — especially those from early Mac, HyperCard, VB, even Win32 — find CSS maddening. It’s not made for precision. It’s made for fluidity and adaptation. But that’s not how app UIs are often designed.#
Last update: Thursday July 24, 2025; 10:22 AM EDT.
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)