- Scaling / reshaping a UI is a fundamentally hard problem that people love to pretend is easy. There are all kinds of tradeoffs that need to be made based on the layout. Which text needs to be preserved? When is it appropriate to show ellipsis? Should padding be dynamic? Apart from CSS another major attempt was GridBagLayout in early Java, which was also a mess.
- Designers tend to be visual arts people who aren't of the correct personality type to dive in and solve all of the nitty gritty issues when making their design. They also like to make complex designs to show how creative they are. They also use their superior social skills to rope high level people to develop and approve the designs with them so that things are final before a dev gets to have a look. Once that happens ego comes into play and they can't be simplified.
- CSS fundamentally doesn't have the correct tools to solve a lot of the issues. CSS first came out in 1996. Line clamping seems like an obvious problem to solve. Yet 28 years later we're still stuck with a prefixed -webkit-line-clamp. In general CSS sees overflowing text as a problem it doesn't want to deal with.
- Scaling / reshaping a UI is a fundamentally hard problem that people love to pretend is easy. There are all kinds of tradeoffs that need to be made based on the layout. Which text needs to be preserved? When is it appropriate to show ellipsis? Should padding be dynamic? Apart from CSS another major attempt was GridBagLayout in early Java, which was also a mess.
- Designers tend to be visual arts people who aren't of the correct personality type to dive in and solve all of the nitty gritty issues when making their design. They also like to make complex designs to show how creative they are. They also use their superior social skills to rope high level people to develop and approve the designs with them so that things are final before a dev gets to have a look. Once that happens ego comes into play and they can't be simplified.
- CSS fundamentally doesn't have the correct tools to solve a lot of the issues. CSS first came out in 1996. Line clamping seems like an obvious problem to solve. Yet 28 years later we're still stuck with a prefixed -webkit-line-clamp. In general CSS sees overflowing text as a problem it doesn't want to deal with.