I had experience with Twitter Bootstrap and Foundation, and I personally think the only thing I want to use is their grid system. Other features are just bloated.
So I read about the prospect of a grid layout. All of the articles I found are oriented toward an 'artistic' explanation (golden ratio ect). I am a coder at heart, I need a clear & logical reason to use a grid layout (for example: 'columns can be easily stacked on top of each other on mobile screen, and expand horizontally on larger screens'). Can someone give me the pros and cons of applying a grid system to my website? Personally do you think using a grid system is good?
If the answer is yes, should I use a premade grid system like from Twitter Bootstrap/Foundation or just make one for my own? All of the other features are unnecessary for me an irrelevant to my problem.
Thanks! :D
I agree with #kunalbhat that this might not be the best area to ask this but since you did I will try to answer it.
The grids are designed allow for speed and adaptability. Speed in multiple senses. The first part of the speed is the speed of writing the code. You can easily get the layout you want when you are using the grid system and everything aligns correctly. You don't have to remember your tables and columns and col-spans, etc.
The second speed is modifying your code. Inevitably you will need to go back and make changes, with a grid this is easily to do. Changing a col-md-7 to a col-md-6 easily makes a little tweak in the layout of your page that can easily be tracked and performed.
You mentioned responsive design, both Bootstrap and Foundation have responsive grids. The grids will snap to different sizes based on the viewport size. However you have control as well. For example if you want something to take 1/12th the screen in desktop, 1/4th on a tablet, and 100% on a phone that is easily done with Bootstrap and Foundation, both have grid classes that target specific viewports.
The also provide visibility classes based on those viewports.
For the "bloated" part that is easily solved. Using SCSS you can easily only import portions of a library. For example for one project I was on I only imported the Grid and it was considerably smaller.
I happen to think that this is a SO question, simply because of one of the main cons of CSS grid systems: semantic.
I think semantic is important for a web developer and having a class named col-md-7 is not the most semantic thing to do.
But I like grids, because they are easy and quick to use, so I started to use LESS. Because it allows me to use variables and functions(mixins) in CSS, I can build my own grid system on my CSS rather then on my HTLM.
You can start on Frameless and customize your own 'classes'.
Related
Why do we need to define the grid for mobile?
What is the advantage of doing so?
Check this example: common layouts with ccs grids on MDN
So, we could have the same results for mobile without defining a grid, just defining the grid at the first breakpoint would do the job.
You're correct for the most part. With the example in that tutorial, there is no difference if you declare the grid at the first breakpoint. The only differences are semantic.
Some of the benefits:
Consistency and clarity:
Your code will be more consistent and easier to intuit what is going on if the same layout method is used across all your breakpoints. Good css is easy to read, even for people who are not familiar with the project, who are not familiar with your coding style. If you intend to use grid layout, it should be consistent and used across the board.
Complexity of layout:
The example doesn't require grid layout for mobile, but that doesn't mean that will always be the case. As you iterate over the design, you may need to add more complexity later. If the structure is in place from the get-go, the refactoring process becomes easier.
Still, there is an argument to be made for only including code that is absolutely necessary to implement the correct layout. It's really down to personal preference whether you include it or not.
I want to start a blog design from scratch as a week-ends project, but I have problem to see how I can render it via CSS.
In a CSS grid system you can define the size of a column based on the number of elements e.g. I have 12 based grid and I can decide to have 2 columns: 2 of the size of 6 or one of 5 and one of 7.
[EDIT] I found a website example that does what I would like to achieve: http://www.by-form.net/
Thanks~
The thing about vertical sizing is that it should grow as your content grows, that's why grid systems only include rows with 12 columns, because you'll need your page to grow as the content in it does. As stated before (and I'm not sure if you meant pure CSS grid system when you asked or if you were referring to bootstraps grid system or something similar), you can use a lot of different frameworks to achieve this like Bootstrap or Materialize or even create one yourself (which is a great exercise if your objective is to understand how this works, but not so much if you want to be productive about your project).
Thank you for your answers guys,
I found 2 ways to answer that issue:
the masonry grid Javasript layout that handle very closely to the original idea of how I wanted to handle it.
or a nested grid (a grid within a grid), e.g. profoundgrid
I don't have much knowledge about this but using bootstrap css you can achive the grid system.
check this out
Your grid in the image is very complex.
I don't think you can achieve a layout like this without any rows or columns that is flexible enough.
What I mean by that is, that you surely want the boxes to grow when the content gets bigger. This could be a big problem cause there are so many dependencies to next and previous columns.
I wrote an answer to a similar question showing a variety of CSS Techniques to do layouts. Check it out, it might be helpful here.
Anyway, if you reduce some dependencies and know exactly what the order of the content should be and look like, it would be much easier.
I have a webapp that I am making and it has some particular layout needs that are closer to an application than a website.
The layout has:
a left sidebar that is fixed to the left side of the browser window and has a static width until it stacks, this sidebar will have tabs in it
a content area that will expand to a certain max-width and then stop
a right side bar that is fixed the the right edge of the content
I've been struggling to really determine if using a grid system, like bootstrap, would be an appropriate fit for something like this. Having some rows/columns and a collapsible grid in the content area seems like it would make sense, but in the sidebars it seems like its best to not use a grid system at all. I don't particularly like the idea doing some layout in the html with bootstrap3 and some in css.
Basically my app has the same layout as http://qz.com/ and I want similar responsive design breaks, and with that I would like to know if there is one or more css frameworks that support that type of layout with little overriding.
if you have some experience with resposive design and media queries, i would code it myself to avoid the thousands of lines of unnecessary code that comes with frameworks/libraries. bootstrap is great, but it also requires a bit of effort to master, and it would be a bit overkill for this one layout (if i understand you correctly).
if you just need this one layout, i would really recommend you do code it from scratch (personally i'd use something like jQuery and LESS). i hope i understood your question correctly, and sorry if this was not very hands-on.
to sum it up: in my opinion you're probably better off coding it yourself, but bootstrap and other frameworks will provide valuable insight and inspiration for how to do it.
Since I new with CSS, I just started to work with CSS Grid system. I would like to know if are there any technical issues in use CSS grids? I mean, which are the reasons for you to not use grid?
Thanks
Flexibility
Once you start using the grid, you are stuck with it. Any other issues you might wind up finding you will have to conform to.
In my opinion (and every other designer I've talked to) it is far easier to simply define your own columns and default sizes as classes and apply them as-needed. A custom grid if you will. Then changing the styling is as easy as changing a line or two of CSS, instead of either re-generating the grid system or redesigning the site and sacrificing in order to use the grid.
I'm a fan resets and some minor love from Blueprint (especially the Typography), but that's about it.
I've just started using object oriented CSS (OOCSS). I'm really enjoying it because it provides a very basic and minimalistic grid system. It allows you to create relative sized grids by dividing an element into halves, thirds, fourths, or fifths. The divided elements are infinitely nestable.
OOCSS is more of a philosophy than a framework. It's all about how you extend a very basic foundation.
Check out these links:
http://oocss.org/
http://developer.yahoo.net/blogs/theater/archives/2009/03/website_and_webapp_performance.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6sAm7CLoCQ
The only real reason is that they can lead to bloated markup, sometimes you have to do some serious nesting depending on the layout and desired effects+flexibilty.
They also lead to excessive class name lists on elements. However, you can avoid this at least if you move the CSS to semantic classes/ids before deploying... but thats can be alot of extra work. Blueprint is the excpetion here because it has acommand line tool to allow you to apply the rules from its framework classes to semantic selectors.
Overall i generally use them because its alot easier to teach a designer how to use a grid template. That why im not do alot of production art tasks when i go to slice things down. It jsut makes the whole process smoother IMO.
If your site has a column layout AND repeatable design patterns throughout the site... then there aren't any reasons not to include a grid. A grid adds: organization, proportion and alignment to your page. So why not keep that consistent? There is no reason.
Just don't Overuse A Grid
Some people say a grid is inflexible? That's not totally true - you can use it where you need it. You can always remove it or adjust. Just don't overuse it.
It depends on the grid system. Most grids have a fixed amount of columns, which restrict you in how you create your layout. For example, they don't allow you to combine 30%/30%/40%, 50%/50%, 25%/75% and whatever other combinations you can think of.
Some grid systems also don't allow nesting. That means you can't use a grid element as a grid for child elements in those grid systems, which makes it a lot more difficult for many layouts to be coded to HTML.
Also, some grid systems use techniques that don't work in older browsers. Before you use a grid system, you should always make sure it supports the browsers you need to support with your project.
There are frameworks out there without such restrictions, though. Cascade Framework, in fact, has a grid system far more flexible than that of any other framework out there and works fine in both IE6-8 and modern browsers alike.
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.