What prevented the W3C consortium and browser developers from immediately coming up with css grid?

Question

css

After all, for 20 years (let's even take the last 10 years), layout designers / front-end developers have been terribly tormented (especially beginners) when they could immediately do it right. Plus, the layout technology changed about once every 5 years. The practice of building a layout on floats in general, in my opinion, was a cruel misunderstanding, it would be better to continue to typeset tables, skipping all this (and many who did not master this technique did so by the way), because in the end they came to the cells, css grid is just a better table layout.
Take, for example, c# or python3 at the time of their creation (and many other technologies/languages) - they worked well on them and laid down all the necessary tools for years to come, and since then not much has changed there (or am I mistaken?).

Answer 1

What prevented the W3C consortium and browser developers from immediately coming up with css grid?

Nothing interfered. There was simply no need.
When CSS was created, there was only text on the web.
And with the design of the text style sheets did a great job.
After a while, images began to appear.
And only now we have come to more complex design solutions in layouts using images, decorative elements, animation, adaptability for different devices, etc.

Answer 2

Take, for example, c# or python3 at the time of their creation (and many other technologies/languages) - they worked well on them and laid down all the necessary tools for years to come, and since then not much has changed there (or am I mistaken?).

You are very wrong.
Languages ​​have changed a lot over the course of their lives.

Answer 3

Yes, no one suffered. The float grid is intuitive, easy and beautiful. Yes, semantically a crutch, but it works and works well, no more complicated than flexbox or grids.
I will say this - I did not master the floats, get out of the profession. It's easier than grids.
It’s just that then there was no need to build complex interfaces in which flexbox and grids would win, and in general, then there were no browsers / hardware that could display and play all these animations and so on.

Answer 4

Time...

Answer 5

they did a good job on them

did a good job, but in the closed branch 2.7 they still put a major improvement that adds + 15% performance