Using zurb foundation 4 grid system to design list elements - css

Foundation 4's grid system, with its mobile first approach is a no brainer when it comes to styling the layout of a page when you already use other foundation elements (whether it is textual content, the general layout of images/content on the page like main content and sidebars).
In the following example page, each grey rectangle is made using grids and nested grids:
I often find myself designing "tabular data" which consists of elements and subelements (like individual grey boxes in the center of the previous image) that look a little bit like this:
Some elements like the controls have to be aligned, and when you click on an element it reveals a dropdown menu with more detailed information about the item.
I often use the grid system for this kind of elements during mockup phase, because it's quick to archieve the alignment and try different widths, but when refining the design, the foundation grid gets in the way with its default behavior when resizing the browser, spacing and it produces a lot of grid specific markup making the html code hard to read and understand.
So my question is: do you use foundation grid for these kind of details in a design, and if not, what's your favorite way to get multiple elements on the same line with different alignments, and having certain elements aligned with each other (simple divs with hardcoded width? display: table? something else?).
I know there is a new CSS3 flexbox module coming to allow this kind of display but it looks more to me like a replacement of the foundation grid system than the way to go when styling this level of details in a design.

It looks like the way to go is to use Foundation grid mixins (like explained at the bottom of the page).
It gives you the best of both worlds: the ease of use of the foundation grid while still being able to fine tune the behavior of the grid (space between columns and so on) that could be different for every elements you style.
Another advantage is that you don't need presentational classes. Instead of writing something like
<div class="row">
<div class="large-12 columns">
<div class="myItem">My Item</div>
</div>
</div>
You can go with
<div class="myItemWrapper">
<div class="myItem">My Item</div
</div>
While having in your style.css.scss someting like
#import 'foundation_and_overrides';
.myItemWrapper {#include grid-row(nest-collapse);}
.market_label {#include grid-column($columns: 12);}

Related

Is it possible to build this layout with no JS and no duplication of elements - only CSS?

I've been struggling to find a way to build this layout. All elements have unknown heights except for the social elements. The related and latest elements are optional.
I'd like to do it without resorting to JS or duplicating elements but I'm actually not sure if it's even possible.
Mobile and tablet are very easily handled with flexbox and the "order" property. I thought I could handle the desktop layout by reverting to floats but since the element heights are unknown this isn't guaranteed ( i.e. the latest and/or related elements might float over to the left if the body copy is short ).
Any ideas? Or should I just suck it up and dynamically add a sidebar to the DOM with JS for the desktop breakpoint?
Edit: Note the order of the elements! If I place the desktop sidebar elements in a container I can no longer re-order them on mobile/tablet with flexbox. Also, I don't believe grid-layout applies since the desktop layout does not follow a grid pattern.
Two-dimensional page layout like this is what CSS Grid was designed for. Flexbox is more suitable to arrange items in one dimension (although a second dimension will easily follow when nesting or wrapping). As others have mentioned, this layout should be totally accomplishable with CSS only.
One approach using CSS Grid is having three template area definitions that change on each breakpoint, as demonstrated here.
Part of the HTML and SCSS for that:
<div class="grid">
<div class="area social"></div>
<div class="area body-social"></div>
<div class="area categories"></div>
<div class="area related-latest"></div>
</div>
.area {
&.social { grid-area: social; }
&.body-social { grid-area: body-social; }
&.categories { grid-area: categories; }
&.related-latest { grid-area: related-latest; }
}
#media (min-width: 64em) {
.grid {
grid-template-areas:
"body-social social"
"body-social categories"
"body-social related-latest";
}
}
I took the liberty of combining some of your sections into areas, as I’m unaware whether the visual design would disallow it. You might have to manage some additional gutters if it does. Also note that the right column in the wide layout is currently only sized to the length of the text inside, which will probably not hold with real content. There will be more use cases I haven’t addressed, but if anything my example can be a starting point for you to work from.
A slightly different approach would be to define grid-template-columns and grid-template-rows for each breakpoint, and configure the correct grid-columns and grid-rows for each area or section. This would imply some more explicit sizing, which has pros and cons in itself.
Furthermore, you would need to think about which layout you want to present to people using a browser without support for CSS Grid.
To learn more about modern layout techniques in CSS, I recommend checking out the articles and videos by Rachel Andrews and Jen Simmons.
Let me know if you have additional questions or remarks.

Twitter bootstrap grid: is it possible to simulate smaller screen by adding class to container?

Does Twitter Bootstrap 3 provide a built-in way to "simulate" a smaller screen by adding a css class to grid container?
My use case is that I want to display an section of html using bootstrap's grid normally on a large screen, but I want to reuse the same snippet for displaying in a modal (which is much narrower). For example, say I have this html:
<div class="container">
<div class="row">
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12">One</div>
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12">Two</div>
</div>
</div>
Is there a built-in class I can add to the .container element (like .simulate-sm) to force the columns to display using the sm grid definition, even if it's on md screen? The html above is just an example: my real-world html has a large number of rows and more varied column combinations, which makes me hesitant to try to massage the column classes individually.
Thanks for your help!
There is nothing built in, but with the right CSS (including descendant classes), you can make a single added custom class do all the work for you. In your specific example, you would add .simulate-sm to the .modal-body div like so:
<div class="modal-body simulate-sm">
<div class="col-md-6 col-sm-12">One</div>
....
and some custom CSS:
.simulate-sm .col-sm-12{width:100%}
.simulate-sm .col-sm-8{width:75%}
.simulate-sm .col-sm-6{width:50%}
.simulate-sm .col-sm-4{width:25%} /* extrapolate as needed */
Do this for whatever column classes you've used in your original code, doing the basic math to figure out % width. (i.e. the same as Bootstrap's).
The combination of descendant specificity and using this on the modal-body means it ONLY overrides Bootstrap's styling when within a modal (to which you've added the .simulate-* class).
Here is an example: http://www.bootply.com/KhNbrdUzoE
I can't quite visualize your problem, and I've never had to do this myself, but I feel like this snippet from the documentation is relevant to your need:
Grid classes apply to devices with screen widths greater than or equal to the breakpoint sizes, and override grid classes targeted at smaller devices. Therefore, applying any .col-md- class to an element will not only affect its styling on medium devices but also on large devices if a .col-lg- class is not present.
If you remove the col-md-6 class definition it sounds like the col-sm-12 definition will take effect for all form factors equal to or larger than the small screen.
Apologies if the answer is irrelevant. Was a complete shot in the dark.
If you are looking to emulate what it would look like on a mobile device, most browsers have emulators. For example in chrome, you would inspect an element and there is an emulator option on the bottom near the console. In terms of emulating a screen "bigger" than yours, there are websites that allow you to view your webpage from a different resolution. With a quick google search here is an emulator: http://quirktools.com/screenfly/

Modularising CSS questions

I am looking at different CSS modularising methodologies and trying to implement some of their ideas into a new project. Some I am looking at are SMACSS, BEM and MVCSS.
I understand that in SMACSS layout rules should be in my _layout.sass file which is fine so my styles are as follows:
.container
+container
+margin-leader
+margin-trailer
+container sets this element as a grid container from Compass Susy and then adds top and bottom margin.
I now want to add a border radius and box shadow to this element.
Where do I place these styles as they don't fit within the layout stylesheet?
2nd issue is:
I have created a media block which basically allows an image to be floated left and some text to be floated right. It has a flipped variation that flips the two around.
I need to be able to specify the width of the image but where does this go? I have for now placed it as part of the media block module code but surely that means that ALL images inside future media blocks will be that width. It seems like the width of the image needs to be elsewhere but I am just not sure where. I know I could add classes to the image in the markup like "small", "large" etc but to be that sounds like adding presentational stuff to the markup which I thought was what were were trying to get away from.
3rd issue:
I have created a title-box module that is marked up as follows:
<div class="title-box">
<h3 class="title-box__header">Upcoming Events</h3>
<div class="title-box__content">
</div>
</div>
I want 3 of these boxes side by side. I know how to do it but unsure of the correct modular way to do this. Any thoughts?
1) According to BEM methodology you can use mixes to solve your first issue:
<div class="container widget"></div>
This means that there are 2 different blocks on the same DOM-node: container (knows about layout) and widget (styles the block with border radius and shadow).
2) You can add class to these images making them elements of media block and then specify types of images with modifiers:
<div class="media-block">
<img class="media-block__image"/>
<div class="media-block__description">Some text</div>
</div>
<div class="media-block media-block_float_left">
<img class="media-block__image media-block__image_type_important"/>
<div class="media-block__description">Some text</div>
</div>
So image elements of media block which are important can be styled with bigger size.
Also you can use modifiers to set float direction.
3) I'm not sure if I got your question right but I think you have two options:
Style title-box itself (e.g. as float with some margins).
Add styles to title-box in it's parent file with cascade if it's possible to use title-box somewhere outside with different layout.

auto-adjusting "span" classes with twitter bootstrap

I must code an html viewer which take some objects as input and provides a nice html layout. For the layout part I decided to use twitter bootstrap 2.3
prerequisites
The objects are represented as divs of different size
I don't know the number of divs to display in advance
Now, what I want is an "auto-adjusting" layout able to displace in the most convenient way the object in the screen. The concept is sketched in the following image:
on the left you can see the objects, on the right the desired final diplacement.
I nearly get it work in this way:
<div class="row-fluid">
<div class="node span6">a box</div>
<div class="node span6">a second box</div>
<div class="node span6">a third box</div>
<!--as much divs as you want-->
</div>
but in the second line I get a bad "tilted-right" effect due to the margin-left settings of the bootstrap css.
I also tried to override the css specification of the span to adopt a margin-right driven approach but with no luck (if it is interesting I can provide info about this approach).
Any suggestions?
You can do this by using bootstrap and the :nth-child pseudo selector. However, this that you are trying to accomplish will also require that you make CSS changes beyond the simply .span's left margin... You will probably need to re adjust this with smaller #media queries and it's probably outside the scope of this question to show you how to do all that, however... this should get you going:
Here is a jsFiddle
The fiddle above has bootstrap loaded... I'm making a container with the class .row-fluid in which I'm adding many .span6's, but I am also making sure that on the third and then every two more .span6 it's removing the left margin so it stacks two and two .span6 per row.
You can read more about the :nth-child pseudo selector here

Best way to create a div with Label: Textbox and have it nicely centered?

What's the best way to have the following?
Name: [Textbox]
Inside a div? I find that the Name: part doesn't center nicely with the textbox, especially with a small font. I want the Name: part to be centered vertically.
In some cases, the left hand part can be quite long and wrap onto multiple lines, like this:
All known
addresses: [Textbox]
Again, I would like the left hand part nicely centered.
I'm trying to stop using tables for layout, and move onto divs so I can do things properly, but I am having some issues. style="vertical-align:middle" doesn't seem to do anything.
There is no good way to do this. There's a decent writeup on some methods here, but most of them rely on hacking-around fixed-height elements, or using table/table-cell layouts on divs.
If having things centered is a hard requirement, I'd just give up and use tables
use tables or 2 divs: one for the label and another for your text box, so you'll be able to align them properly.
HTML5 is giving us some pretty cool features to aid in these type of instances. Elements such as <section> and <article> can be quite useful depending on your circumstance.
http://www.w3schools.com/html/html5_new_elements.asp

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