I am using Flex 4.9. I thought that with the newest SDK, they finally made Flex and CSS components tags to work. But they did not.
I tried to set horisontalAlign and verticalAlign of spark HGroup vie CSS style, so I could manage it smoothly and save some code typing. HGroups didnt respond to CSS style I applied, ok, I thought that at least I will set their width. It also did not work! Nor pixel width or percent value.
Does Flex CSS styling is really so limited or am I missing something?
horizontalAlign, verticalAlign, width and height are all properties of the HGroup class, not styles. Hence you cannot set these properties through stylesheets.
What you seem to be missing is that Flex is not HTML and that the same semantics do not apply. In Flex 4 we separate the content from the way it is presented mainly through a process called skinning: we declare components and their logic in one class (usually in ActionScript) and we define its visual representation in another (usually written in MXML).
With this separation already in place there is hardly any need for stylesheets. In fact, if you would put a CSS on top of that, you would kind of artificially try to separate the layout into two separate entities which doesn't make much sense. Not to mention it would make the code much harder to read.
There is a case where CSS comes in handy though, that is when you want to apply a certain visual style throughout your application. A Button could have five different skins, but through CSS you could set the font color of all five to a specific color without repeating that in each skin.
Related
I was talking to someone about Flexbox, and he said Flexbox is a library/light-framework which sounds a bit weird to me and now I'm confused.
Is it a framework or not?
Flexbox is just pure CSS, not a framework
The CSS3 Flexible Box, or flexbox, is a layout mode providing for the
arrangement of elements on a page such that the elements behave
predictably when the page layout must accommodate different screen
sizes and different display devices. For many applications, the
flexible box model provides an improvement over the block model in
that it does not use floats, nor do the flex container's margins
collapse with the margins of its contents
Flexbox is a commonly used term that refers to the CSS Flexible Box Layout, which is a CSS technology. It is just plain CSS.
Of course, in the same way jQuery is derived from JavaScript, there are various frameworks that have been derived from flexbox (e.g., Angular, React Native, Bulma, Flexbox Grid, Basis, etc.)
I don't think so. According to wikipedia, a framework is software used to alleviate a lot of the work associated with web development (source). I would not consider flex a framework simply because it is default/native/included browser behavior. No external software is needed to use flex in your website.
I don't think there is one definition for what a framework is, but I have never considered default html/css behavior to be a framework. To me, a framework is code that I have to install or download to be able to use in my website.
CSS3 (unlike its predecessors) is a collection of specifications.
CSS Flexible Box Layout (or Flexbox) is one of these CSS specifications.
Others include:
CSS Color Level 3
CSS Selectors Level 3
CSS Media Queries
CSS Multi-column Layout
CSS Shapes Level 1
CSS Grid Layout Level 1
CSS Writing Modes Level 3
and so on.
For the entire range of CSS Specs currently completed or in development, see:
Descriptions of all CSS specifications
CSS Current Work (summary)
We have a medium size application with around 30 views. We have many CSS files laying around. Some are specialized (popup styles) but the rest contains style for different parts of the application, in addition of the style embedded in the *.ui.xml and it's start to get pretty messy.
Is there any guideline on how to structure the styling in a GWT application and in a web application in general ? How do you structure yours ?
There are two schools of thought on this. Some developers prefer to use CSS Resources.
My strong preference, after 7 years of experience with GWT and multiple projects, is to have a single external CSS file for all styles. I even do not include any GWT stylesheets (including DataGrid styles) - I copy their content into my CSS file. These are the reasons for this preference:
CSS is called a cascading style sheet for a reason - it is build around inheritance. A professional web designer builds an app design starting from the very top (html, body elements) and defines the rules for the entire application: font or fonts to be used, color palette, standard margins and paddings, standard grid (columns width), etc. These rules must propagate throughout the entire app. Once developers start defining their own styles at the view/widget level, it's nearly impossible to ensure any design consistency across the app.
Even more importantly, when the CSS rules are split between many different sources, it becomes very hard to predict their interactions. Why is this element not positioned correctly or has the wrong font size? Is it because I used the wrong selector in the widget CSS, or is this because some other rule from some other CSS resource overrides or conflicts with it? Now you find yourself jumping back and forth between different stylesheets trying to make it work.
Even if you do find a source of the problem and fix it in one of the stylesheets, now you have to check how this change affected other views and widgets. Making a change at the top of the DOM tree can impact every element at the bottom (again, it's cascading!). Often it's not easy to anticipate this impact in every browser possible.
These considerations become even more important when you try to make your app design responsive and make your app adjust nicely to different screen sizes. What happens to your view or widget-level CSS when you add a media query in your main CSS file?
Another important point is the speed of development. If you use a professionally designed CSS file, you almost do not need CSS at a view or widget level. When I add a new form, for example, I never need any CSS - I just throw a sequence of labels and input widgets and they all suddenly look right and they are positioned correctly, because the rules have been already set and they apply to all forms, input elements, labels, etc. in the app. I do not think what font size or color to use in a widget. I just use a <h2> header, for example, and it has one color in a light skin and a different color in a dark skin, and it changes its size and margins according to the screen size.
Finally, moving as much CSS away from the widgets makes it easier to reuse them in new projects. Using the same example, if a header does not have a font-family, font-size, color or margins specified in a widget, it will take these values from another app's CSS file (which may or may not be the same rules as the contributing project's file). So you can reuse the widget in a new project without touching its code, which again speeds up the development process and makes maintenance so much easier.
To summarize, a single CSS file makes it easier to enforce style consistency across the entire app and maintain code, and considerably speeds up the development.
I find Bootstrap insufficiently flexible. For example there's not a straightforward way to change font or line-height properties. I want a one-line method to change these properties.
What else can I use similar to Bootstrap (that I'm sure will not be as rich)? I just need some style collections that are flexible for those kinds of changes.
You can change all of the typography values (and pretty much everything else) on the Customize Page. The links are in the toolbar at the top of most pages of the Bootstrap site.
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 have a web app that I've recently applied a jQuery ThemeRoller theme to. Now I want to have a simple <h2> element have the same rounded-rectangular look as the dialog titlebar or datepicker title. How can I best apply these to my elements that aren't part of larger jQuery UI constructs?
I started down the path of just setting css class values manually based on what I could see inside Chrome's inspector tool, and I got part of the way there before I got nervous that this wasn't going to necessarily be the best way since I'm bypassing any css class assignment logic that might occur inside jQuery UI.
So, is there an easier way of applying those styles, or should I just go down the road of explicitly setting css styles on my headers?
There isn't any magic to the jQuery ThemeRoller CSS styles, if you look through the CSS files that it generates, you will find that they are generally clear and concise and easy enough to read.
The rounded corners in the ThemeRoller CSS will not work in IE, so you might not want to depend on them too much, but if you do, just apply the CSS using style='blah'.
stevedbrown's answer is quite correct.
You can apply rounded corners to any containing element by using the ui-corner- prefix. For example, to apply rounded corners to all four corners of a div element, you'd use ui-corner-all.
To only style the top corners of that same element, you'd apply ui-corner-tr ui-corner-tl for the TopLeft and TopRight corners.
Another possibility to the above is, if you know the CSS attributes you want to copy, you can do it programmatically like:
var defaultColor = $(".ui-state-default").css("color");
var defaultMargin = $(".ui-state-default").css("margin");
and apply these to your elements
$(".your-css-class").css("color",color);
$(".another-css-class").css("margin",margin);
etc
Kind of clunky, but it does allow your CSS developers to update the themerolled themes and you don't have to worry about updating any of your code anymore.