thoughts on position: absolute?

[dogbrain]

absolute positioning amirite fellas..... we've all erred with it at some point. when i was new to html, i made the mistake of over-relying on it to format my page, and I later learned the hard way why that's not considered best practice 


this seems to be a common experience from what I can tell, so i'm curious what your thoughts are on this somewhat controversial method of positioning? when do or don't you use it, and why?

personally, i tend to shy away from using it unless i absolutely have to (pun not intended). nowadays i stick with grids and flex for creating a basic layout, and then layering miscellaneous elements with absolute positioning.

others are perfectly happy using it liberally, which is cool! there really are no rules on the personal web, as long as you don't mind a bit of spaghetti code XD

[ValyceNegative]

Me and my brother call position absolute the devil of CSS and box sizing border box the angel of CSS. It sounds like random freakish words to anyone else but I know HTML peeps will understand!

My main problem with position absolute is that its function seems to be switched with position relative, because going by names only, relative seems to do exactly what you'd expect absolute to do, and vice versa. What were they thinking??

[candycanearter07]

pos absolute is incredibly annoying to deal with, it just breaks so many semantics and imo a lot of the things people use it can be replaced by float? like using absolute you have to redesign your entire site around it and not making it overlap instead of just having the computer arrange things for you and its also really not portable with screen sizes

My main problem with position absolute is that its function seems to be switched with position relative, because going by names only, relative seems to do exactly what you'd expect absolute to do, and vice versa. What were they thinking??

I do not get this. "Relative" means to position it relative to where it is currently, and "Absolute" means to take the position tags as coordinates on the screen (or containing element-another thing that makes position absolute confusing)

[ValyceNegative]

I do not get this. "Relative" means to position it relative to where it is currently, and "Absolute" means to take the position tags as coordinates on the screen (or containing element-another thing that makes position absolute confusing)

Allow me to explain, although you kinda replied to yourself by mentioning absolute readjusts depending on the containing element: to me, "absolute" shouldn't do that. It should position itself based only on its own coordinates ignoring its parent container.
W3Shools does mention that absolute makes an element "positioned relative to the nearest positioned ancestor" which, frankly, sounds more like a feature that would benefit of the name "relative" to me.