CSS still seems to be pretty painful at expressing layouts, such as the main object for the page centred vertically and overlapping other elements to the left / right of it. There are many articles about them, but they all seem to explain to you how to do this painful thing, rather than explaining how its done elegantly.

It makes me curious about whether we should even expect to wish such things for a nice web experience, i.e. if the standards committees even consider these as they discuss specs and direction. Should one even expect these things to become as easy as, say, working with lists or paragraphs?