So, I was having a play with Flexbox this evening and have managed to re-create my relatively complex responsive layout using only flexbox items and no media queries.
There would be no getting around the need for media queries to make a production version (changing background images, font-sizes etc), but in terms of the layout, I have a working version which is completely fluid and has much much simpler code (See note below)
This brings me to my question; should I be doing this?
Note: I've used excellent SASS mixins by Brian Franco to simplify the cross browser aspects of flexbox.
I suppose that the main disadvantage of this approach is that browser support of FLexboxes (especially new syntax which gives the maximum possibilities for 'completely fluid' layouts) is a bit worse than browser support of Media Queries. For example, IE9 supports Media Queries, but doesn't support any syntax of Flexbox. Also, there might be inconsistensies between 'old' and 'new' Flexboxes behavior that can't be fixed with SASS approach. Hovewer, I believe that it would be very interesting and informative experiment.
Related
I am new in front end design and when I was looking information about this I found 2 techniques about positioning: float and flexbox.
My question is: What should I use more? I'm oriented in mobile design too.
As this great article sums up:
Floats
Advantages
Most popular way to lay things out; most grid frameworks follow this.
Everyone's aware of float bugs due to the popularity of floating, and there are well documented ways to overcome them.
Disadvantages
Need to be cleared. Can be quite painful if you're changing widths at 2-3 media query breakpoints, because the floats will need to be cleared that many times.
No vertical centering
No equal heights
No source order independence
Use for:
Large layout blocks that don't need equal heights and vertical centering
Flexbox
Advantages
Source order independence. Could be of tremendous value for responsive layouts and eliminates the need for JS for this.
Vertical centering
Equal heights
Flex boxes move along interchangebly the X and Y axis, with such ease, that you can really change things around with a couple of properties.
Boxes grow and shrink, can be columns or rows, fit to the available space however you wish to declare this.
There are multiple ways to do the same thing with flexbox.
Disadvantages
Syntax is initially unintuitive. You spend the first few hours looking at demos saying WOW, followed by WTF.
I've been noticing weird cross browser inconsistencies [...]
A deep understanding of Flexbox takes a while. Once the layout gets more complex, or you add a couple of divs, things can get confusing. I'm going to document this more in an article.
Lots of vendor prefixes, with a different syntax for older IE and Webkit. Use something like Autoprefixr to work around this. Or write some mixins. Or do something..
Doesn't work on IE9. If you don't have to support IE9, you're fine.
Reports of the older syntax impacting performance. I wouldn't care too much about this honestly, especially if you were using JS to do the things Flexbox now can...
Use for
You can already start using it for vertical centering, if you don't need things to look the same on IE9.
If you don't need IE9 support, it's perfect for source order independent layouts, equal heights.
I would highly recommend using it for personal projects.
App layouts where things need to stretch and squish. Flexbox really shines here.
So to recap', flexbox is the modern way, very powerfull but harder to learn. As it is kind of new, there is also a lot of bugs and it is not seemlessly compatible. floats are the old way: it is more basic, but easy to use.
When learning CSS and making responsive column layouts, I was taught the flexbox method (but also the fact that you should avoid using it too much). Recently, I watched a newer video from teamtreehouse that uses columns, column-counts and so on, to make a responsive column design. Which one is better to use, or is there a third option that is the best?
Edit: Sorry, apparently it's an older video. The reason I'm asking is because it wasn't on my web design track so I wasn't sure whether it was relevant anymore.
Most modern page layouts are moving away from floated columns and migrating to flexboxes. You'll find that even bootstrap 4 are going to be basing their layouts on flexbox.
The main advantage of using flexbox I find is vertical alignment, which is revolutionary. Because before that was one of the biggest pains developers had to face. You can also re-order dom elements which is pretty cool. There's also flex basis, which allows you to have a div with a fixed dimension, and allow other divs to occupy the remainder of the width/height. The possibilities are endless!
TL;DR Flexbox makes your life hella easier. Only if supporting older browsers isn't an issue.
I came across the column-count in our codebase, and was surprised by it, after 6 years of being a frontend dev, I hadn't heard of it. So I dove into it a little bit and also found this thread. To answer the original question above:
When to use column-count
When you are using a lot of text or for instance checkboxes, and you want to order them into columns, column-count is a good option. It basically creates the columned layout of a news paper article for you. So you give the number of columns and the browser will calculate the height. The drawback here is that you often times don't want multiple columns on smaller devices, so you would have to put it within a media query. If you want to know more about it, read this article: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/01/css-multiple-column-layout-multicol/
When better not to use column-count
If you want to have more control over your columns and rows, for instance where certain content should go within the column, use flexbox or grid. Also when you don't want columns to have the same width, you are better of with flexbox or grid.
Note that CSS grid is not the same as the old floated columns. It sounds like teamtreehouse used CSS grids.
The CSS grid is a 2d system (rows and columns) while flexbox is 1d (either rows or columns). So they can be used in conjunction, css grids for the page layout and flexbox for the internal detail layout. See :
https://tutorialzine.com/2017/03/css-grid-vs-flexbox
You might want to take a look at Boostrap if you are already comfortable with CSS and want a responsive design. It's easy to pickup. I find it saves me alot of time and effort rather than coding your own CSS for every project.
When working with css you need to constantly think what browsers you want to support, and then choose which features to use. For that there's a handy website http://caniuse.com/
For example in your case you can see that ie8 doesn't support columns http://caniuse.com/#search=columns and neither it supports flexbox http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox so if you want to support ie 8 I suggest you would use the tipical floated column approach. There's many grid systems out there but I'd go with as suggested above. http://getbootstrap.com/
Can anyone please enlighten me on how the new Flexbox layout model is any better than current tables way? (display:table and all those are includedin my case) ?
It's not supported at all under IE10 which isn't very good for the near future, and I just can't see any benefits over table layout. But still, the internet is starting to get full of "worshipers" of this new CSS method of layout, and all the examples I see can be easily done with normal css without problems.
Update 25.12.15:
I have been using flexboxes a lot since they were introduced to modern browsers and had stopped using display:table and so on, because flexboxes are more powerful and easy to use.
There are three distinctions I can think of between using flexbox and using table display values or floats to layout a page:
Being able to re-order elements irrespective of the HTML source order, while keeping elements in the normal flow - you can do this by specifying an integer value with the order property.
It requires less typing than traditional float layouts (you don't need all of the pseudo-elements for clearing purposes) and is more semantic, while using floats or tables for layouts obviously isn't.
The ability for flex-items to grow and shrink to fill horizontal and vertical space based on an ancestor elements' dimensions - by using the flex-grow and flex-shrink properties.
The problem (as you've pointed out) is that support is still pretty bad; In fact Firefox is still implementing an older version of the flexbox module, so you have to account for minor discrepancies in syntax and behavior, depending on which browser you're using. It has been said quite a bit, though, that it is the future for layouts, especially for complex web apps that are popping up more often. It's worth learning if you're okay with making an inevitably wise investment - at the cost of not really being useable right now.
I also suggest you take a look at this smashing magazine article for a friendly introduction to flexbox (it's fairly recently written)
The Flexbox model is more powerful than display table. Flexbox supports layouts for right to left languages for example. And yes indeed, flexbox is a bit complex and that's an entry barrier. Float and clearfix layouts are a (clever) hack, somehow in the same way table layouts are a hack, flexbox is meant for layout.
The browser support is getting better lately, some say we should use it now. Bootstrap 3 does however not make use of flexbox, but i can imagine that the next version will.
Simply put, it's something that'll be beneficial in a few years. Like many advanced css techniques, HTML5, etc., a few people will adopt them with painful fallbacks and shims/shivs for the next couple of years.
When browsers support it in the future, we'll have a party and all hate on the 'old' browsers that don't support them :).
Flexboxes are more flexible and semantically appropriate since tables were never meant to be used for layout. From MDN introduction to Flexbox:
Why Flexbox?
For a long time, the only reliable cross-browser compatible tools available for creating CSS layouts were features like floats and positioning. These work, but in some ways they're also limiting and frustrating.
The following simple layout designs are either difficult or impossible to achieve with such tools in any kind of convenient, flexible way:
Vertically centering a block of content inside its parent.
Making all the children of a container take up an equal amount of the available width/height, regardless of how much width/height is available.
Making all columns in a multiple-column layout adopt the same height even if they contain a different amount of content.
As you'll see in subsequent sections, flexbox makes a lot of layout tasks much easier. Let's dig in!
I am building a responsive layout with Twitter Bootstrap and I am finding it difficult to keep the layout looking good across all sizes/devices.
In my early attempts I tried simply using the grid for placement, but page elements never ended up where I wanted them at different sizes. Now I am at the point where I am using media queries to override some of Bootstrap's styles and my own styles. This seems like it may cause a maintenance headaches down the road.
Rather than overriding styles I am thinking that I should add/remove the styles based on the screen's size by registering for media query events.
Can someone offer advice on good practices for adjusting the layout of a page at different screen sizes using Bootstrap?
I am looking for general advice, but I can post code and screenshots if that will help.
Update: Looks like media query events are not well supported.
Your on the right track. Use CSS media Queries. Firefox has a nice add on that enables you to adjust the page to a particular viewport so that you can see the changes pixel by pixel, though Im sure chrome would have something similar
There are no special tricks just because its bootstrap, as long as you have enabled the responsive stylesheet then you are pretty much good to go
This is a good place to start for media queries
http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/media-queries-for-standard-devices/
I'm in the early stage of building a site. I'm looking at some design elements that would take advantage of media queries to work properly at smaller screen sizes.
I've no problem with this except that this will be a small site and therefore pretty much the only javascript running on it will be a Polyfill for media queries for IE and other limp along browsers.
How much will this impact performance? Are there any proper tests that have been ran?
I ask because I'm in the stage now that if the polyfill affects the performance enough I can tweak the design so I don't have to use them, and also as a thought for future projects.
Bonus Question:
If I don't use mobile first but use mobile last, and do max-width queries rather than min, would I even need a polyfill. If nothing about the page is changing until it's less than 500px wide do I really need to worry about IE not displaying them? Or am I missing some edge cases?
Let's start with your bonus question.
If you approach with max-width media queries, i don't think you actually need a js solution for IE8 and below. That said, it really depends on what's your site "breaking point".
Probably, a user who still has IE7 running won't have an hd screen with 1920x1200 resolution. So keep in mind to make everything work well for 800x600 screens without media queries involved.
Personally, i prefer a min-width approach, so i can progressively enhance my site features. But it really depends on your project type/audience.
According to StatCounter's global stats, at Sept 2012 ~14% of users still use IE8, and less than 2% IE7.
If you want to serve the best user experience for this 15% (~6 every 100), then you probably need respond.js.
I've used and tested it on IE7 and IE8. I didn't notice a difference in performance, but i can't find any benchmark test online.
It's recommended by Modernizr and included in html5boilerplate responsive build, so i'm pretty sure you can...trust it ;-)