Things don't get a lot of eyeballs on them on w3.org which defeats the object of the post which is to get developer feedback. It's pretty normal for CSSWG members to ask for opinions via tweets, on their own blogs, or in other places. I've posted stuff to my personal blog in the past. This is something that will be worked on in the CSS Working Group, it happens to have people from Chrome working on it, however it will be discussed with the rest of the CSSWG who have a range of affiliations: https://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/members.en.php3
The latest version of autoprefixer has the old grid support off by default, I'm not sure of a scenario in which it would be useful to be honest. The spec in IE10,11 and Edge is solid, it just is more limited than the updated spec.
That wouldn't work because it would rely on markup although display: table is pretty handy as a fallback for small UI elements in particular.
The grid (and flexbox) specifications define how fallbacks should work, making it pretty straightforward to create good - not identical (because what would be the point?) experiences for the browsers you need to support.
So, for example with display: table which generates anonymous boxes, the spec defines that box generation won't happen.
My daughter turns 20 this year. I learned Perl as a young, soon to be single, mother. I had no computer science background, I just wanted to learn to do more than the basic HTML I had already taught myself. That learning gave me a career.
I've only ever done this with a child to take care of, and I've done it by simply working every possible moment I could, and being organised and focused with my time. However being able to provide for her, made that worthwhile. I started my own business when she was still only at school half days, and we talked about work, and why I needed to work, and that work was where money came from. The money to eat, have a home, and do nice things together.
I count myself lucky that I get to do things I enjoy. However it is amazing what can be achieved with hard work and focus, and a purpose.
It's built using my other product Perch Runway, using our Shop add-on :) took me about half a day to put together as Shop deals with membership stuff by default.
Interestingly it has been very popular with teams (so selling a set of licenses so a whole team of developers can use the material). I also teach the same material in person (either in-house or in open workshops) so I'm keeping the two in sync. I made some notes about that process on my blog: https://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/06/03/creating-an-e...
I intend to do a bit more marketing of both the in-person and online training in the new year.
As an independent (not working for a browser vendor) invited expert to the CSS Working Group, training and offering this course is really how I can fund doing that.
Creating HTML and CSS with the aid of a time machine would be far easier. The problem with HTML and CSS is that we can't break the web, and much of HTML and CSS comes from a time where the kind of things we want to do now couldn't really be imagined.
I would really encourage anyone who thinks the web platform as it stands is sucky to get involved in trying to make it better. There are lots of interesting things happening - a lot of them behind browser flags.
It is also worth remembering that flexbox was never designed for complete layouts. It's designed for one-dimensional layout. UI elements such as forms fields, navigation, sets of "card" etc. You run into a whole bunch of issues if you see it as the holy grail for layout, because you are using the tool for something it wasn't designed for.
That isn't the case. Firstly, you need to take a look at the browser stats for the site that you are working on. It may be that in your case you have a very high percentage of old IE users, and so for you, flexbox isn't an option. Even then though, you may be surprised.
If you use flexbox as an enhancement, to get really good alignment of UI elements for example, then you can often take advantage of it to make the experience really great in newer browsers while not locking out old ones.
I would suggest taking a look at Zoe M. Gillenwater's talk. She works for Booking.com. Are they locking out old IE users? Of course not. So she demonstrates how to enhance responsiveness with flexbox. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_98SE8WUvLk
That would depend entirely on the browsers you need to support. For example I have a product aimed at web designers. Our support in terms of our marketing site for the up to date flexbox spec is about 98%.
Our product is used by their clients. Some of those people are using IE8 and 9. So the approach we take for our product marketing site and the product itself is different.
Flexbox however isn't really designed for full page layout. The UI items it is really great at are often much easier to deal with in terms of legacy support than you entire layout is. You can often use flexbox to enhance a design even if you can't go all in. I would really encourage you to have a look at this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_98SE8WUvLk Zoe works for booking.com and demonstrates how they use flexbox AND ensure legacy support.
My own experience is that I look for novelty outside of the main job I'm doing.
Our product (https://grabaperch.com) is a PHP and MySQL CMS. A self-hosted PHP and MySQL CMS. That means that we are not only PHP, but we have to support really old PHP, we support right back to PHP5.3 as that is the reality of the terrible shared hosting people use. Then in the UI we have to support the browsers that our customer's clients use. So we can't use all the latest front-end techniques.
So it's very easy to get bored and not learn anything new.
To counteract that my personal projects tend to be about really new stuff, for example I've spent a lot of time writing and talking about an emerging CSS spec that interests me. I tend to implement new and interesting things in our own stack too where we don't have the constraints that the product does.
So my best advice would be to see if you can channel your novelty seeking into places outside of work, and accept that work sometimes involves having to stick at something that is boring. Sad but true!
According to my parents I could read at age 3, I can certainly remember petitioning my father to be allowed to read The Hobbit when I was 5. My mother got into trouble when I started school because the teachers didn't know what to do with a 5 year old who could read and write!
I was taught by the "look and say" method, now not used in British schools at least. They teach phonics now. Interestingly my daughter is dyslexic and struggled horribly in school to learn by the phonics method. It was when I started teaching her the old fashioned way that she picked it up.
You are very welcome to contribute!