That's great reference (thank you for the link) but one of the great - if not the single greatest - accomplishments of the web was that it allowed anyone with a text editor and access to the internet to publish content with ease. I get that commercialisation of any platform will lead to specialities in that field; however the tools shouldn't make it objectively harder for new comers to contribute. Let alone discriminate against hobbyists who might not want to spend several hours of their life learning CSS (never-mind HTML, perhaps Javascript, how cookies work and any regional legislations, OWASP should they dare to have any user submission forms, etc).
Talking personally, I published my first website in 1994 when there wasn't different layout modes. Now it is suggested that I read a multi-chapter book just to learn what's changed in CSS so I can publish the same content I had before but in a "web 3.0" (for want a better description) format.
I appreciate my comments are very ranty / preachy and do value your comment as I hadn't seen that link before; so my comments are not directed at you in any negative way at all! What I'm essentially just trying to say is web development has become very frustrating for anyone outside of the webdev community. Heck, I find it frustrating and I used to specialise in hardening web servers so have worked quite close to that community.
It is as simple as it ever was to do what could be done 15 years ago with a simple text editor and access to the internet. Any adjoining aspect has gotten easier and cheaper by a magnitude.
It's just that what people want has gotten a lot harder to build.
The removal of the <center> tag in place of CSS black magic is definitely not "easier" than it was 15 years ago. However I suspect this is going to be one of those debates that we have to agree to disagree on.
I should add that I don't disagree with the deprecation of <center> from a language purists perspective. However it was still a step backwards in terms of ease of development when centring stuff in CSS is so clunky in comparison.
http://book.mixu.net/css/
can help with the trial and error bit. It impossible to get an intuitive feel for nearly 400 keywords IMHO.