Comment by kevingadd
19 days ago
That doesn't seem like a #2 scenario, unless you're okay with your centered divs not being centered some of the time.
19 days ago
That doesn't seem like a #2 scenario, unless you're okay with your centered divs not being centered some of the time.
looking at most websites, regardless of how much money and human energy has been spent on them:
yes I think we're okay with divs not being centered some of the time.
many millions have been spilled to adjust pixels (while failing to handle loads of more common issues), but most humans just care if they can eventually get what they want to happen if they press the button harder next time.
(I am not an LLM-optimist, but visual layout is absolutely somewhere that people aren't all that picky about edge cases, because the success rate is abysmally low already. it's like good translations: it can definitely help, and definitely be worth the money, but it is definitely not a hard requirement - as evidence I point to the vast majority of translated software.)
Humans can extract information quicker from proper layouts. A good layout brings faster clarity in your head. What developers often get wrong: it's not just about doing something, it's also about how simple and fast to parse and understand it was (from a visual point of view as well, of course information architecture and UX matter a lot as well). Not aligning things is a slippery slope. If you can't center a div, probably all the other things that are more complex in your website / app are going to be off or even broken. Thankfully AIs can center divs by now, but proper grid systems understanding is at best frontier.
It absolutely helps, but this is about whether it's truly needed or not.
I think there's overwhelming evidence that it's not truly necessary.
I could imagine a vision-enabled transformer model being useful to create a customizable “reading mode”, that adjusts page layout based on things like user prefs, monitor/window size, ad recognition, visual detail of images, information density of the text, etc.
Maybe in an alternate universe where every user-agent enabled browser had this type of thing enabled by default, most companies would skip site design all together and just publish raw ad copy, info, and images.