I'm not putting CSS on a pedestal, but the last 25 years of web adoption would suggest CSS helped. You can do quite a lot with it. There are new features being added all the time: some of them even look useful (I wouldn't know.. I've been supporting devices from 2016 for the past four years so I'm out of date).
Could those CAD packages auto flow live text around the objects? Could you dynamically add new objects to your presentation in response to data and user interaction, and have them lay out perfectly according to your rules?
The paddings issue can be fiddly, but a little discipline can help. You've got two different width-calculation schemes to choose from. Flex & grid remove the need for most margin-wrangling and layout hacks. You can create relationships between objects and parents, and rotate/scale/translate groups of objects in 3D. You can flow text around irregular shapes. You have LOTS of control over fonts these days (I can't keep up with all the new font rules).
It may not be the pinnacle, but it's quite a reasonable compromise that's very easy to get into (admittedly hard to master, but so is most coding).
> That’s how CSS works, not visual design.
Visual design definitely, often employs a set of top-down ideas/rules, modified by sub-rules and ad-hoc exceptions.
> It mixes all together and you can’t even design a generic container because its customization will affect the inner content containing that type of a container. And all its custom margins will fight with its own margins-as-a-child.
If the paddings of your generic container don't suit some uses of that container, then maybe it's not as generic as you thought.
Could those CAD packages auto flow live text around the objects? Could you dynamically add new objects to your presentation in response to data and user interaction, and have them lay out perfectly according to your rules?
The paddings issue can be fiddly, but a little discipline can help. You've got two different width-calculation schemes to choose from. Flex & grid remove the need for most margin-wrangling and layout hacks. You can create relationships between objects and parents, and rotate/scale/translate groups of objects in 3D. You can flow text around irregular shapes. You have LOTS of control over fonts these days (I can't keep up with all the new font rules).
It may not be the pinnacle, but it's quite a reasonable compromise that's very easy to get into (admittedly hard to master, but so is most coding).
> That’s how CSS works, not visual design.
Visual design definitely, often employs a set of top-down ideas/rules, modified by sub-rules and ad-hoc exceptions.
> It mixes all together and you can’t even design a generic container because its customization will affect the inner content containing that type of a container. And all its custom margins will fight with its own margins-as-a-child.
If the paddings of your generic container don't suit some uses of that container, then maybe it's not as generic as you thought.
Also, this is pretty easy to do: