Can't help thinking that Visual Basic had a better layout manager than CSS. I hate fixing CSS issues with a passion. I watch a designer whip up something in Illustrator and can't help thinking that CSS & HTML are a primitive way to do layouts.
Smalltalk had a GUI based approach to design in the 70s on a 2 mb disk, and most web layout is generating html & css, then tweaking that stuff. It doesn't feel like web layout is a progression.
Interestingly, Visual Basic did it all with absolute (pixel-by-pixel) positioning. Some (not all, but some) of the issue is that we have moved forward in what we expect out of UIs.
(The rest, of course, is that the Web front-end is a shitshow of epic proportions)
Smalltalk had a GUI based approach to design in the 70s on a 2 mb disk, and most web layout is generating html & css, then tweaking that stuff. It doesn't feel like web layout is a progression.