I have started to use BEM with a site I am styling. I am trying to understand to how to far I should be breaking down components (blocks). For example, I have a header that has a navigation bar in there. The header is classed as a block but the navigation bar in there could be a new block or part of the header block. What is best advised here?
I was hoping to find some example sites that implement this sort of thing to get a good understanding of it but up until now, I have found nothing that appears to demonstrate it.
I am also working under the assumption that the component should layout its elements, so this is great, a good candidate for flexbox. The problem I face now is laying out the component in the page. Imagine having to layout 2 components side by side, another good candidate for flexbox but knowing where to place the display: flex ? also wouldn't the component then be in charge of placing itself within the page by using flex item css i.e. flex-shrink, flex-grow, basis, order etc..
This means that the parent is dictating where to place itself on the page and it isn't 100% an independent block now as it needs a display: flex on its container.
I did find some info with regards to file structure and wondered if this was something that could help? Maybe I am not fully understanding it - could the directory Layout be used for this?
This site uses the BEM methodology with Flexbox included.
http://fantube.me/
All the answers are on the https://en.bem.info.
how to far I should be breaking down components (blocks)
https://en.bem.info/methodology/quick-start/#should-i-create-a-block-or-an-element
it isn't 100% an independent block now
https://en.bem.info/methodology/css/#mixes
some info with regards to file structure
https://en.bem.info/methodology/filestructure/
Related
I'm intermediate in my Angular understanding and am trying to wrap my head around how to accomplish the following.
I want to create a UI component that can be used to contain heterogeneous content, likely from other components.
It displays a certain amount of the content with an overflow ellipsis affordance.
It has a full border and a header.
The issue is that due to the border and functionality, I want this component to contain the content controlled by some other component.
I've looked at inheritance, directives, and manipulating the view container. Each solution looks is intuitively displeasing as is either impossible or would seem to place a heavy load on the DOM render.
Use
Read detailed tutorial at http://toddmotto.com/transclusion-in-angular-2-with-ng-content
This is a hypothetical question, as I haven't really written any HTML code in years. Provided you have an HTML page, and its content is semantically structured (so you have your main content in a <main> and <article> tag etc.), you would probably have your ads as one of the last elements in your source code, as they will semantically be least important. Financially, however, they would be rather crucial, so you'd like to have them displayed at the top of your page, above the "fold" (maybe in a right-hand column or "sidebar").
Is there a way to "push"/move an aside or div container (holding your ads) up in a sidebar/column, just using CSS - without having to absolutely position them?
Would you position them relative to the containing element (that forms the column), then add margin-top to the element that would be next visually (i.e. first child of the column element - say your navigation)?
Is there a way of doing this if you don't know the height of the "ad" containing element in advance (say because it's containing text, not an ad)?
Is there a way of achieving this, nowadays, with the latest HTML and CSS features? Or is visual design still dictating markup structure after all? :)
It's possible in CSS3 using display: flex-box and order: # to reorder how elements display, but CSS3 only works in modern browsers.
It doesn't make sense to do this when the ad will always be in a specific place, though. Save yourself and others the confusion, and keep HTML in charge of layout.
Is visual design still dictating markup structure after all?
This question sounds backwards. "Does markup structure still dictate visual design?"
No, that ended with the rise of CSS2 positioning.
You can use JS to create a widget and position it wherever you want in the layout, or create the ads as separate templates and use JS to retrieve and position them. This will work in almost any browser.
For the most part if your requirements are simple then it will be easier to simply place the ad element where it is required in the markup.
Visual design does not directly dictate markup, but designing markup with layout in mind makes life easier.
I am just trying to achieve the following CSS layout using 960 GS. Pretty much an newspaper article kind of layout. I am finding some problem with positioning.
I am using for your kind info
$ninesixty-grid-width: 978px;
$ninesixty-columns:12;
$ninesixty-gutter-width: 0px;
$ninesixty-class-separator: "-";
I could not achieve the newspaper kind of layout with the image inside the text. Please guide me out some links or pointers or code to achieve this. Let me know if you need futher info
You didn't say if you already had the grid or not, but anyway if you go to - grid generator site and enter the settings:
Firstly wrap the whole page in a container-12 then I would use the following classes on your divs for the layout:
NOTE:
I think you will need to put both elements in the first grid-6 to avoid a float issue. Other things to consider is that you don't have a gutter so elements will be tight up to each other. I would suggest amending the settings and adding a gutter.
Usually I would not add padding to the grid elements as that means you would need to edit the widths and that goes against the grid system.
Are there any existing plugins/extensions/methods to maintain vertical rhythm for Twitter's Bootstrap project?
It is quite a laborious task to create good vertical rhythm templates, I would rather use a pre-baked solution. I am open to creative suggestions, I just want my pages nicely aligned in the end.
Edit: To clarify what I am after...
Vertical rhythm is a technique used to ensure that every element on a page lines up according to a horizontal grid. This is achieved by setting the height, padding and margin of every item to conform to a standard unit line size. If a line of text in a paragraph is 20px high (including margin and padding) then maybe a heading 4 will also be 20px high, and a heading 1 might be 40px high. This maintains the rhythm of the text across columns.
I want to use this technique in combination with bootstrap (from twitter), but it would be quite a lot of work to get everything looking nice. For example, all the buttons would need to conform to the same vertical height definition as paragraph text etc... There are other standard controls used in bootstrap which would also all need rules to define their height appropriately.
I could start with a generic solution for vertical rhythm, which would go a long way to achieving what I want, but I wanted to know if anyone else has started this, or has any idea of another way to achieve this.
Edit: Assuming there is nothing like what I want...
Maybe just a good vertical-rhythm based css template would be a good starting point. Preferably something that is continuing to be developed, is already usable, well thought out, and adaptable.
Since no one has linked to an actual vertical rhythm boilerplate as you suggested, I took the one I use, commented it, and created a github repo for it here https://github.com/jonschlinkert/vertical-rhythm
As it says in the readme, this is a starting point for your own project.
I think what you're going after is understood. Problem is: you're looking for a grid schema in one dimension (a "vertical rhythm" set in accordance with, for example, proportional line heights...which, in a manner of speaking, measures and aligns things along a given page's Y axis)...but doing things in that manner might potentially be at odds with Bootstrap's pre-existing 12-column grid system (which, in contrast, measures and aligns things along the page's X axis). You want to "proportionalize" the height of each "row" in the framework. BUT: keep in mind, Bootstrap's design is intended to promote not just proportionality via columns solely for the sake of looking nice, but to also make pages responsive--i.e., to allow page elements to "flow" around one another vertically, and to nest fluidly. And, in that sense, issues pertaining to the height of elements measured along the Y axis may already be accounted for... I recall that most of the typographic elements in the base CSS file have proportional em sizes, and/or likewise proportional top and bottom padding, etc. Generally speaking, things are not so arbitrary that the framework screams a need for additional styling in the manner you're considering.
Even so: Bootstrap's base CSS file isn't so intolerably extensive that it'd be impossible for you to tweak the height of various element classes and IDs yourself without too much trouble. In any case, it's highly unlikely you're really going to need to do that with every styled element, right? In fact, as a framework, Bootstrap includes styling for many elements which may not even be in the app for which you're designing the front end. (EXAMPLE: Does your app have drop down menus? Great. You can style the "vertical rhythm" of drop down menus. BUT: are you also using pills or tabs in your nav bar? No pills, you say? Well, you can just delete a couple hundred lines of code in the stylesheet and save yourself the effort of having to apply your "vertical rhythm" to those unneeded elements.) Elsewise, for the elements that remain and that you do in fact need, just use a text editor to find-replace the values for line height, top and bottom padding, margins, font-size, etc...and test it out. As a CSS framework, it's pretty clear how Bootstrap is laid out; relevant elements are well sorted, and grouped together within the stylesheet's code for the most part. Once you do complete tweaking of the base CSS file, just minify your revised stylesheet...to replace the pre-existing minified version...or, perhaps, just serve it up from CloudFront if you want to optimize.
The Compass CSS Authoring Framework has explicit support for vertical rhythm based typography. For starters you can check out this short video tutorial.
Have you looked at the Square Grid CSS framework?
http://thesquaregrid.com/
A simple CSS framework for designers and developers, based on 35
equal-width columns. It aims to cut down on development time and help
you create beautiful-structured websites.
Square Grid provides a standard horizontal grid, but it also maintains a vertical grid, using a standard "square" of 28px. It is really just a grid, not a full CSS library like Bootstrap (i.e. no buttons, menus, etc).
I used to for one project and found it to be pretty intuitive, though I ultimately decided that it was too hard for me to keep track of both the vertical and horizontal grid, especially when thinking about responsive design.
You may be able to combine the two, or at least take a look at the square grid source code which is pretty simple CSS to get some ideas on how to adapt Bootstrap to meet your needs.
I'm working on a web app that currently has a table-based layout. Ideally I'd like to go to pure css, or failing that, a hybrid tables-and-css layout* .
I've banged my head against the wall trying to understand css layouts and positioning. The main problem I'm encountering is that, depending on the state of the app, I have different things appearing in a 'section' of the layout -- what might be contained in a div or table. For instance, I might have some text and links, and then after user interaction, there might be a form, a table, some images, different text, etc. Anytime I find a css solution, it is for a fixed-element layout, or works in a specific case, etc. They're not robust solutions, in other words.
From this In Search of the One True Layout, the author about "Vertical placement of elements across grids/columns": "Designers face the choice of relying on elements being a particular height, resorting to tables or simply not bothering." Is this true? In my app, I can't rely on elements being a particular height.
Do I fall back on tables when I have elements of various hieghts ( which is quite a bit of the site, actually). I noticed that quite a bit of sites done by well-respected people and organizations use tables for layout in certain places, and not just for tabular data! This site included.
The chances are that there are CSS techniques to achieve what you want, but they may not be obvious if using CSS for complex layouts is new to you.
In your case, to 'get it done', I would recommend a hybrid type layout, and not feel bad about using a table to layout the pieces of the application that require those particular behaviours.
If it is particularly complex and difficult than a table might be the best and simplest approach even for the CSS expert.
Dynamic heights are only a problem if you need to implement a special effect of soem sort or a background image and oftent there are ways around that. It really depends on the Visual Design and what needs to be done to make each "block" flexible to use. Sometimes things arent possible but most of the time they are - they jsut tend to add complexity to the markup. But even that added complexity is easier for me to understand than nested tables :-)
My advice if you want to get things done and spend a ridiculous amount of time on css layout, browser compatibility, CSS reset, fonts:
write simple, valid, semantic HTML
use a simple CSS framework (like blueprint). You will rely on a simple grid system for positioning and layout.
add CSS classes to your HTML
add your custom CSS for colors, backgrounds...
Please reconsider using a table layout 'to get it done'; you will be disappointed, especially if you want to add some JS magic later.
I use CSS layouts for my web apps. But, my apps don't have wildly varying information, so I can set the content area and not have to worry about the layout looking "off" because a column is way out of balance with the rest of the content.
If you're having trouble with CSS layout and positioning, I'd suggest tables first, learn more about CSS/HTML positioning, and then convert your layout LATER. I'm sure that it's made for a frustrating experience learning CSS on a "real" project.
In the meantime, get some really good sources for CSS: books by Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Eric Meyer, et. al. Also, go to their blogs and dig into the archives. A really good book for CSS layout, positioning and general use is Beginning CSS Web Development by Simon Collison from APress. All the ins and outs with great working examples.