I mean, sure, I guess you could take it as literally as "in tim berners lee's original browser version" but frankly, CSS and the ability to reflow the document is so old at this point that getting anal about it not being literally there since the beginning of the web is just silly.
Have perhaps a little bit of charity and assume that what was meant there was "since it was possible".
I mean, all the comments I got were not about my main points at all.
"No you should do this because of that" is not a valid argument when both "this" and "that" only exist because you created them. If vcenter was part of the original spec, we would have it because the browser publishers would have made sure they fulfilled the specs. We have yet to have it. We are being told valign is a complex feature, and we just accept it.
But you should always model your specs based on use case, because that's who you're serving. Anything less than that is ego and dogma driven development.
And to me, the most disappointing and damning evidence was that w3c does not even author their own web site. They are not users.
Being from MIT, I could only imagine how fun a student driven implementation effort could be, and they'd do it for free. I was not alone in 1999 building web pages in an Athena cluster.
Not sure why writing on HN is so often a negative experience. Not sure why I keep doing it.
Have you considered proposing your idea to the CSS working group? The w3c are just the editors, CSS is developed in the open and anyone can propose extensions.
Have perhaps a little bit of charity and assume that what was meant there was "since it was possible".