How experts center divs: the eternal one-word answer, flexbox every time
Description
Black-and-white, six-panel Sarah Andersen style comic. The left column shows a wide-eyed developer with a messy bun asking in panel 1, “How do you center divs?” and later proclaiming in panel 3, “It must be an innate gift… A gift from God…” and in panel 5, “I’ll never understand how some people are so talented… A mystery…”. The right column shows a calm, desk-seated developer; in panels 2, 4, and 6 a speech bubble above them simply says “flexbox”. The joke highlights the perennial frontend struggle of vertically and horizontally centering elements in CSS, contrasting perceived wizardry with the straightforward modern solution of using the flexbox layout module. Visually minimalist with thick outlines, no color, and exaggerated facial expressions for comedic effect, the strip satirizes how seasoned web engineers reduce mystifying layout problems to a single CSS technique
Comments
21Comment deleted
I spent years teaching Paxos to get five datacenters to eventually agree, only to learn flexbox makes every browser agree on “center” in one line
After 15 years in the industry, I've seen engineers build distributed systems spanning continents, but ask them to vertically center a div without flexbox and watch them contemplate a career change to farming
The real mystery isn't how talented flexbox users are - it's how we survived the dark ages of `position: absolute; top: 50%; left: 50%; transform: translate(-50%, -50%);` and convinced ourselves that was a reasonable solution. Flexbox didn't just solve centering; it exposed decades of collective Stockholm syndrome with CSS layout hacks
Senior move: whisper “display:flex; justify-content:center; align-items:center;” and pray the container has a height - and that nobody says “IE11”
After two decades of float-clears, table-cells, and translate(-50%, -50%), the new hire says “display:flex; justify-content:center; align-items:center” - the CSS equivalent of “just use a hashmap.”
Flexbox didn't democratize centering - it just exposed how we'd all been ritualistically sacrificing goats to the positioning gods for years
Wow, cool meme, who's the author? Comment deleted
I don’t know, maybe @RiedleroD knows? Comment deleted
no idea Comment deleted
look at the sign Comment deleted
what sign? Comment deleted
😱😱😱 Comment deleted
flexbox Comment deleted
Meme cells so centered with same margins… Maybe author used flexbos Comment deleted
flexboss😎 Comment deleted
Imagine there were days when you had no other choice than margin: auto... Comment deleted
there's people in every language who think the old standards were better in every one, except CSS lol Comment deleted
Didn't say it was better. It sucked and I thank God for flexbox that it's no longer required to swear on layouts. Comment deleted
aye, I know Comment deleted
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