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Warning: I used to hand-tune every margin, now I just let flexbox yell at me
Back in 2016 I was the person who set every margin and padding by hand, sometimes with weird numbers like 13px or 27px, just to nudge things into place. I kept a little text file of magic numbers for each site I built, and aligning two boxes side by side meant floats, clearfix hacks, and a lot of swearing at IE. These days I throw everything into flexbox or grid and let the browser sort it out, which honestly feels like cheating. Last Tuesday I was fixing a header for a restaurant site and the gap between the logo and nav kept jumping around at different screen sizes, so I swapped the floats for display: flex and it just worked. I still get caught off guard when a stray whitespace between inline elements adds 4px of mystery space, and I laugh because I used to fight that exact battle with font-size: 0 hacks. Part of me misses the control of pixel pushing, but I do not miss refreshing 50 times to check a float drop. Does anyone else still keep a stash of weird pixel values out of habit, or did you all move on years ago?
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garcia.miles8h ago
Did flexbox really fix that gap, or did it just hide the whitespace thing you mentioned?
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