I have barely used anything other than vanilla CSS but would really like to do a couple things that aren't working well now:
I have an inner border inside a div, which I want to actually border the inside of the encapsulating div's border (double border). However with window resizing, the inner border will sometimes have too large/small width/height, even when using a measurement like % or vh/vw. I need the inner border (just a div with a border right now) to always stretch/shrink to fit snug right next to the parent border.
Similarly (notoriously) with centering, I imagine there must be a library with the ability to easily center elements vertically and horizontally. Generally I use flex box but would love something that works more consistently, elegantly and intuitively.
What say ye?
I think you're talking about a CSS framework, they help out a lot, especially when working on a major project. I would check out Twitter Bootstrap or Google's Material Design, I personally use mdbootstrap, which is a 3rd party hybrid of the two.
You could give Tacit a try for this particular need.
Tacit is a class-less CSS framework were all you need is just a single <link> statement in your HTML and the web page will have a complete and finished look.
The centering of elements vertically and horizontally come out of the box, and you can skip the usage of <div> elements or the work of defining classes for your elements.
As a side note, here are a few examples of pages that use Tacit, and the only work put into was including the CSS file: http://filfreire.com/, http://www.jare.io/, https://socatar.com/
Related
Using Angularjs Material framework, I aligned the content (containing cards) to the center, the problem is when I increase the height of one card, the height of the adjacent card also increases. Example code http://embed.plnkr.co/eaLjJDbjL1KnOI4jLYyO/preview
The cards will have dynamic height, and should align one after another both horizontally as well as vertically.
I am trying to achieve some thing like this:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-6ocJpsXmVLU/VTgSj9wd_CI/AAAAAAAAACs/PavEWs9wiGM/s1600/cardLayout.png
I don't think this has anything to do with Angular. It looks like your example is using flexbox CSS, which is the cause of your columns having equal height. Remove all the flex attributes and your cards will take take the height of the contained content. If you are looking for a masonry tile layout you'll likely need JavaScript to help with that since elements float left and clear one another. Take a look at this and see if this helps http://masonry.desandro.com/
Was answering another question about centering a div that had the bootstrap's span12 class applied to it, and part of the solution was to reset the float as the span12, as well as the other span* classes, are floated.
Since span12 width is 100% when combined with row-fluid and 1170px when not (and other sizes that I suspect are meant to fill most of the area on different screen sizes)
This to me suggests that it is mostly a standalone grid item: not meant to have other grid elements floating along side it.
I could see if they wanted to allow for having other grid elements along side it for really huge sites (screen widths of like 2560px etc), except this would not work at all when using row-fluid as the first one in the row would take up all the space as it uses 100% width.
But I personally have not seen many, if any, sites that would use such a huge width that would allow for using a span12 grid element along side other grid elements.
So does bootstrap implement other styling methods that make it necessary to float the span12 class? Or are they just anticipating future use for huge sites?
As I use bootstrap myself, if it is necessary for other styling techniques I do not want to end up one day having removed the float when it is needed and also do not want to mislead others when answering questions if the resetting the float would end up messing up their layout when using bootstrap.
Edit
As DontFeedTheCode points out this has been addressed in Bootstrap 3, all the other grid classes get floated while the 12th one does not.
in the 2.3.2 version looks like they were using [class*="span"] as the selector for setting styles so span12 gets selected by accident
As bootstrap is written in LESS, and in 2.3.2 all span classes were generated using .gridColumn() mixin - all span classes had the float:left;. This is not for any large layout like 2500 or such.
I have a page that I'm working on (longtime developer, new to CSS tho) where I have layed out a bunch of divs with content. I tried to make each div at the same level and not nest a bunch of stuff so that I could move them around more easily. So the question is if I want to have those divs in a completely different layout, is it appropriate to use CSS to put negative margins on a bunch of stuff along with relative positions an shove them into the right place.
So if page one was:
<div class="div1">stuff here</div>
<div class="div2>other stuff</div>
So by the natural order of divs, div2 is below div1. But what if I want to move div2 above div1? The only way I've seen to do this is to set div2 to relative position and shove it where I want with top, left, right and bottom.
It seems odd, but it works. It just seems really inelegant. One page is natural and requires no manipulation, the second is forced into place.
Is there a better way to accomplish my goal?
You are trying to do structure with CSS. That's not what it is for. The structure is done with the HTML, and CSS does the presentation. If you want to reverse order than change the HTML. Then use CSS margin, padding, align, float, and all the other attributes to get exact positioning and the polished look you want.
HTML is a MACK truck. CSS is Porshe.
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/09/19/css3-flexible-box-layout-explained/
Scroll down/search for box-ordinal-group. Essentially you can define reverse order or arbitrary order using flexboxes. Unfortunately, the flexbox display is only supported via browser extensions (-moz/-webkit) by the good browsers. Check out http://icanuse.com for more info.
I was wondering what would be the best way to create a feature strip of background in a website layout?
The approach that comes to mind, would be to create an absolute positioned div with a z-index of -1 and adjust top/height to match up behind a fixed layout.
Is this a good way to go about it? Or is there a better way?
Thank you for any help! :D
A div containing an image placed behind the content is probably the best way to make a scaling background.
I think CSS3 also supports background scaling, but it is not widely supported.
A more semantic approach would be to apply the background strip to an element on the page -- in the case of your example, the "slideshow" element. This element's outer constraint (whether that be a div, a ul, or something else) can then be stretched to 100% of the width of the page, and the content of the element centered (or positioned as desired).
This approach would be more maintainable than some other approaches -- content could be added before the element without breaking the layout, the strip could be changed without much effort, etc.
Background scaling could be taken care of in several ways:
Make your background big enough that it isn't likely to ever be a problem.
Use a tile-able background.
Use CSS3 background-size property. A jsfiddle example is here. (Not supported in <=IE8, but with a little creativity could degrade gracefully.)
Put the image inside your div (or similar) and then use CSS to position absolutely, set the z-index to force below the content, and stretch the image to the width and height of the element. Here's a jsfiddle example. (Note: UNSEMANTIC! Reduces maintainability, etc. But does have better support than CSS3 background-size...)
Number of websites "cheat" : the site's background image already have the strip on it
It's simple and painless but it's static.
I sometimes find myself creating a div which serves no other purpose than to hold another element.
For example when creating a menu, I would create a div and assign it a background colour, position etc. Then within it I would create an unordered list.
I could surely assign all the properties I assigned to the DIV to the UL and not use a div at all.
Any ideas of what is best practice and reasons for it.
Thanks
Zenna
DIVs can be useful for grouping semantically related elements. If you are simply wrapping a single element that is also a block element, then you are simply adding bytes to the file.
No, they are not. The purpose of a div element is to create block level structure in the document. If you can lose them just lose them. Never use divs to solve design purposes, css is for that. Use html elements each like list, data definitions or tables (which were overabused in the past and used as the divs are now for css purposes). The more diverse your HTML knowledge is the less you are using divs all over the place.
I use often divs to keep child-padding/margins from ruining parent-width. But you need to be careful with this type of stuff - you could end up adding a bunch of nonsense.
The real issue is that we are using HTML in ways that its creators had never imagined. The need for 'all those divs' is because some really smart people have found some very creative ways to take a very old standard and do some very modern things with it.
Best practice should be to use as few div elements as possible. If you've got a div elements with only one child, chances are it's a useless div. The div element should really only be used when you need a block element and there is no semantic pre-defined element at hand. This includes grouping elements as Renesis suggests.
In the case of a UL, yes, the DIV is unnecessary. They are both block elements, so anything you can do with a DIV wrapped around the outside you can do directly to the UL itself.
However, because of the Box Model problem with some IE browsers, some people tell you to add these DIVs as a workaround. When you combine padding and width, IE6 disagrees with other browsers about what the final size of the element will be. So one workaround is to put padding but no width on an inner element, and width but no padding on an outer element.
Div's are really a necessary evil without a more semantically rich set of tags.
Their purpose is to server as a generic container. Therefore, I suppose you could say they do their job well.
If you can do what you're trying to do without the additional div, then leave it out. If it's an important part of your design that you can't fix with some clever CSS, then it's still a whole lot better than using tables...
I use DIVS primarily for at least one of two main reasons:
I need it to provide a new physical level of CSS in some way (either child padding inside a fixed width element, a shadow or a double border around an image, etc.)
It logically groups the elements it contains (for future portability and semantics in both HTML and CSS - I.E. "div#menu .label". This way I can use the "label" class several places but have a specific style applied to labels within the "menu" div).
For example, if you were to transfer all attributes to the UL, but then decided you wanted a caption or image above or below the menu but in the same location, you would have to create the DIV again to place the new element inside, and transfer half of the attributes back to it.