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text-align has center as possible value and vertical-align has middle as possible value.

As far as I know center and middle have no different meaning. So why there is a different term for the same thing?

Maybe someone here can tell me the reason of it.

Scott
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blacksunshineCoding
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    `center` refers to horizontal centering whereas `middle` refers to vertical centering – APAD1 Oct 05 '15 at 20:30
  • I know this already, but the terms alone mean the same thing and I wanted to know why they name it different. Maybe because it is better to have unique propertie values? – blacksunshineCoding Oct 05 '15 at 20:33
  • In the context of CSS, they do not mean the same thing. – APAD1 Oct 05 '15 at 20:37
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    they do not mean the same thing because the W3C give them that meaning. better worded question would be: why the W3C has chosen to name these things different. I think it could be because of possible confusions. – blacksunshineCoding Oct 05 '15 at 20:54
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    Yeah, that would be a better way to word it. I think that `middle` is a more effective way to describe vertical centering. The word `center` implies absolute center(vertical and horizontal), but when you're aligning something vertically, it's not necessarily aligned to the absolute center, it's just in the "middle" of the element(half way between the baseline and the top of the element), it can still be left or right justified which is not technically "center." – APAD1 Oct 05 '15 at 20:59
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    It may be a remnant from when both horizontal and vertical alignment were specified by the same attribute `align`, for instance the `` element had `align=middle` and the `
    ` element had `align=center`. It would have been confusing if both were using `center` for different properties! See official W3C docs [here](http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/objects.html#adef-align-IMG) and [here](http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/present/graphics.html#adef-align).
     – Mr Lister Oct 05 '15 at 21:13

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