<CENTER><DIV>just as the founders intended</DIV></CENTER>
/ If your language has 58 ways to accomplish something like that, you're in for a bad time.
this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2025
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Centering a div is pretty fucking easy nowadays. What’s way harder is aligning a god damned SVG icon with text.
Even that is pretty easy nowadays with modern CSS:
<div> <svg /> Text </div>
div {
display: flex;
align-items: center;
/* If the SVG needs an offset */
& svg {
--offset: ...px, ...px;
transform: translate(var(--offset));
}
}
Yeah. Easy. So easy. Text size changes, svg not centered anymore. Add margin (or whatever that inside margin is called), and tada, not centered.
padding
At the risk of getting flamed - I wonder if because CSS is a design tool not a programming tool, it will seem unintuitive to people from a technical background, but more intuitive to people from a design/arts background
Exactly this ^
When we had "backend" people at my shop, they were god awful at css. It was so bad at one point that I scolded any backend person who touched css because they always fucked shit up if they did.
I fuck up CSS on purpose whenever possible to reduce the likelihood of anyone letting me near it.
Maybe you used to work with me? haha
I think you're right. CSS was more understandable to me after reading that it came from the world of print media. It's how things were laid out there and it was transformed into a language from those with domain knowledge.
But I would be curious if those who studied art also use the same terminology. If so, then it would make sense that it would seem more intuitive to them.
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(3 replies)
<p><svg class="icon">...</svg> Text</p>
p .icon {
--size: 1.25em;
vertical-align: calc(0.5cap - 0.5 * var(--size));
height: var(--size);
width: var(--size);
}
Done.
- Doesn’t work with non-square icons.
- Doesn’t align with multi-line text (text wraps to underneath icon).
- Only aligns centered (no baseline).
But that’s pretty good for most cases.
Ahh, yeah that's a bit harder, CSS multiline stuff is pretty flaky from what I can recall. You need to drop down to block layout, e.g. making the containing element a flex parent (Better term than that?) and then making the icon centered within that can work, but then we're back to square one with sizing the icon.
Do people who talk this kind of shit about css really not understand they're just admitting they're not good at css?
If you need to be good at a layout language to center something, then maybe the layout language sucks.
What it says is zero knowledge on the part of the whiner.
You literally just have to give it a width and add margin: 0 auto;
I think it’s implied they’re talking about centering both horizontally and vertically. And probably with unknown height.
Still easy these days , though.
Or use Flexbox
But your solution works as well for simple cases
I generally avoid flex for simple stuff (i like weird browsers), but for more complex layouts it should certainly be used.
If it were designed properly you wouldn't need to be good at it, it would be trivial and obvious to do the only thing anyone ever needs to do to their content within an area of the page
Good news: centering a div is insanely easy to do and has been for like 15 years.
The last time I did any html/css work was about 15 years ago. Now I'm curious what's changed.
flex box, grid layout, and a million other things
Same with people who complain endlessly about JS/TS letting you add a string to an object. I work with this shit daily, these are literally the least of my problems.
Totally agree.
It's nonintuitive and could have been designed better from the outset, but it's not impossible or even difficult. Now can we fight about something meaningful?
vim and emacs are right there, people.
Emacs has a better file-manager and you can setup an extremely great latex-editor.
Also extensions don't randomly not work on bsd as much. There is even evil-mode and no-window option.
The only place vim wins at is that there is an optional and lightweight autcomplete with lsp support you can activate by pressing or in gvim during interactive mode.
And NOBODY uses it.
Vim has one critical advantage though:
I learned it first
div {
display: grid;
place-items: center;
}
Lol, easier to write an article theorizing the ways it can be done than to just show him a centered div.
<center></center>
I only know how to stick it in a cell in a table and center the cell.
Never learned css, a bit left behind now hehe.
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