Simply because forcing people to position their elements relative to the parent element is a needless limitation. What if I want to position an element relative to <body>
? What if I want to position an element relative to a specific ancestor? Well, I could just set position: relative
on the target parent. Without this, I'd need to use JS.
Of course, I don't think this is the best way it could be implemented. If I wrote the spec my self, I'd make it:
position: absolute(selector);
But of course, I don't write the spec.