The British Web Development Consortium issued a formal statement this morning acknowledging that the country’s software engineers have been searching for the same CSS solution since 2004.
The admission comes after a Freedom of Information request revealed that ‘centre div css’ remains the third most common search query on Stack Overflow, narrowly beaten by ‘why doesn’t my code work’ and ‘hello world but it’s broken’.
“We felt it was time to come clean,” said Martin Chesterfield, Principal Engineer at a fintech startup that recently raised £47 million. “I’ve got ‘Senior’ in my job title. I mentor junior developers. I’ve been interviewed about microservices architecture. And yes, I googled ‘vertical align middle’ twice this morning.”
The statement, released at 9:47am, coincided suspiciously with the first stand-up meetings of the day.
According to the Consortium’s internal survey, 94% of developers admitted to experiencing heart palpitations when asked to centre something both horizontally and vertically. The remaining 6% were lying.
“Flexbox was supposed to solve this,” said Jennifer Okonkwo, Head of Engineering at a consultancy that charges £800 per day. “Then Grid came along and was also supposed to solve it. Now I have three different methods that I can’t remember, so I’ve actually made the problem worse for myself.”
The Consortium’s report contained several troubling statistics. Some 78% of respondents keep a specific bookmarked page titled ‘that CSS trick that actually works’. Nobody can explain what ‘display: table-cell’ does, including the 34% who have used it in production. One senior architect admitted he still doesn’t know the difference between padding and margin without looking at the little orange box in Chrome DevTools.
“People think we’re building the future,” Chesterfield added. “We’re building the future on top of a technology from 1996 that was designed to make academic papers look presentable. Nobody foresaw this.”
The statement also addressed the persistent mystery of z-index. “We just add zeros until something appears,” the document read. “Sometimes we go negative. We’re not proud.”
Several developers confessed to copying entire CSS files from previous projects without reading them, reasoning that if it worked once, it might work again. This approach has resulted in production codebases containing styles for ‘.container2-final-ACTUAL-final-v3’.
The Consortium has proposed a new professional standard requiring developers to admit, at the start of each project kickoff, which fundamental web concepts they’ve forgotten since last month.
“Position: absolute or relative? I’ll be honest, it’s a coin flip every time,” Okonkwo said.
The statement concluded with a plea for understanding from project managers who ask why a button is slightly off-centre. “It’s not that we’re slow,” Chesterfield explained. “It’s that we’re fighting a cascade of specifications written by competing browser vendors who all interpreted the word ‘should’ differently.”
The Consortium meets quarterly. Their website is not mobile responsive.
