I'm starting off building a site which should be responsive to different screen sizes. I'm using the Fluid Baseline Grid template which uses percentages for columns and adjusts according to screen sizes using media queries. Now that I'm adding my own custom CSS, I am wondering whether I should be using pixels, percentages or ems for positioning my elements (within the fluid grid elements). For example, margins and padding between divs, widths of input fields etc. Font sizes and line heights are the only things set to use ems for measurement.
Can anyone provide any pointers on this? At the moment I'm leaning towards just using pixels within the percentage based layout that the grid template has preset.
Ideally, you should be using percentages whenever possible, at least on the horizontal plane, so the margins and padding can expand/contract proportionally with the rest of the content. A 10px margin might be great at small resolutions, but it could look much too tight at much larger ones.
Related
I am wanting create a display wall (rows) of images with various aspect rations. (Think like an Instagram wall, but with different sized images, not just square crops)
However, I want the left and right margins to be aligned and for there to be a constant spacing between each image.
So the way to do this is to have the height of each row vary so that the width of each images expands until it is the right width to completely full up the required space.
I could use JavaScript to keep a running tally of the space available and math that against the aspect ratio of each of images.
However I feel this is something I can/should do in (more or less) vanilla css (perhaps using flexbox).
How do I create a table/grid of images, with each row an equal width; with a varied row height, to leave a consistent gap between each of the images? (with a minimal amount of js)
I am wanting to display a wall (rows) of images of various aspect rations. (Think like an Instagram wall but with different sized images, not just square crops)
However, I want the left and right margins to be aligned and for there to be a constant spacing between each image.
So the way to do this is to have the height of each row vary so that the width of each images expands until it is the right width to completely full up the required space.
I could use JavaScript to keep a running tally of the space available and math that against the aspect ratio of each of images.
However I feel this is something I can do in (more or less) vanilla css (perhaps using flexbox).
How do I create a table/grid of images, with each row an equal width; with a varied row height, to leave a consistent gap between each of the images? (with a minimal amount of js)
I always wondered how to fix the gap between floating elements if they don't have the same height:
Here you can see a gap between Featured and Notice which I would like to get rid of. (Get's even larger when the screen resolution is larger since the Featured box becomes more stretched and thus the text spreads over less lines)
Maybe important to note that this is the order of the floating left elments:
Featured
News
Headlines
Notice
Layout for smaller screens (this is looking perfectly fine I just wanted to show you what I mean in the following description with inconsistent layout based on screen resolution)
If the design would be consistent I wouldn't mind implementing some kind of grid system but in my case I'm using styles based on screen resolution so at a certain screen resolution the boxes change from 50% to 100% width (no fixed value used here).
I thought that fluid girds might be the right way to go but after checking them (never used them before) they feel rather static and I'm not sure that they can solve this problem.
EDIT:
Sample of the broblem: http://jsfiddle.net/UfVrH/. Note the fixed height values in A-D are only there to simulate content stretching the div.
To fix such an issue you need to calculate the width and height of each element and re-arrange them by positioning them absolutely, luckily for you there is such a plugin that does this, Isotope
I'm trying to design a fluid / responsive web design using bootstrap. I'm trying to design the layout so that it'll fit in many devices. My question about setting height to a layout element, such as the header or footer. I've got it in pixels right now, but I would like to know if I should be using some other form of measurement.
I'm probably over-thinking this, but I'd like to make sure I'm doing this the right way. Thanks in advance!
Avoid setting a height whenever possible. You can often get around - and preferably so - using padding on the element in question, and/or margin values on the element's children.
If you absolutely need to define a height, use min-height so that it'll grow as its children take up more vertical space.
Many times people fall back to defining static height values because the elements are also using float and add height to get content flow and backgrounds back. This is rather poor practice and if this is the case you should consider looking into methods of clearing floats.
Probably pixels are the best option if you have a lot different devices. Other measurements to consider:
em (1em equals default font size)
% (of the screen)
em and % is the good solution for fluid / responsive web design.
I will suggest for media query css
#media only screen and (max-device-width: 480px) {
}
I've built a dynamically sized grid layout that can adapt to reasonably in any sized resolution (phone, tablet, desktop) and handle resizing, all while being near pixel-perfect (sorry, I'm OCD -- and I say "near" because my math is broken right now and you can't fit two evenly sized elements inside of an odd sized container without padding being 1px off on one side).
Anyway, below is a link to what I've hacked together with JavaScript. It's an example of what I'm trying to pull off. Resize the width of the bottom pane a bit to see what I'm going for.
http://jsfiddle.net/langdonx/uFW2C/2/
It has some ugly manual JavaScript that's since been ported to Angular, but still the ugly JavaScript that calculates all the styles remains.
So my question... can I pull this off with strictly CSS? Or a lot more CSS and a lot less JavaScript? And by this I mean dynamically sized cells based on the width of the screen?
Here are the business rules:
Max cell width: 320px
Minimum # cells per row: 2
this might be impossible with CSS, so I'd be fine with settling on Min Cell Width: 178 for Chrome on my Galaxy Nexus(whose portait mode is 360px wide)
Cell border: 5px with a 2px outline
Visible margin between cells: 3px (margin is actually 5px, but outline bleeds out)
In this example, I'm redrawing the cells on resize every time, but in my Angular version, I believe that just the styles get updated. That said, I could probably get away with redrawing a table on resize, but I'd only have to calculate the cell width based on the document width, and well... I wouldn't be thrilled to use a table. =[
-end mad rant
Media queries
CSS media queries might get you pretty close to a CSS-only solution.
The key concept here is using different layout grids based on the width of the browser, to vary the number of columns.
Media queries are the natural CSS way to change the layout based on the browser width. And they require no JavaScript. If you use a set of media queries -- each one targetting a different range of browser widths -- to control which layout grid is used, then all each grid has to do is be responsive -- percentage widths for each column, and let the content stretch to fill the column width.
Responsive Design
The question then becomes: Is it possible to automatically stretch each piece of content to fill the column using CSS alone? That depends on the type of content, how it's expected to behave when it stretches, and if there's any room for compromise with the graphic design.
Typically, the graphic design for a responsive website has to be tailored to suit the limitations of Responsive Design (with the graphic designers having a rough idea of what's feasible and what isn't). But... whatever can't be done automatically, can be done using JavaScript.
Relevant search terms for attempting to stretch the content: Responsive Design, Adaptive Content, Fluid Grid
Note: "Columns" in this case may simply mean the percentage width used for the floated containers for each piece of content. It doesn't have to mean "physical" columns, in the traditional sense.
When working with multiple resolutions, the "em" based approach seems a good way to code your css file. However, if you have say two resolutions 480x800 & 540x960, then the width ratio ( 540/480 = 112.5% ) is NOT same as height ratio ( 960/800 = 120% ).
So, if I have an em font size = 112.5% for moving from lower resolution to higher, the width seems perfectly aligned to new resolution but height ( which expects font-size of 120% ) seems to fall short and therefore there is a white blank space created at the bottom after rendering all elements for the page.
Any solution to this problem would be great help.
em is a unit of choice for fonts, not so much for element dimensions. With it evaluating to element's font-size, it's simply not reasonable to be setting widths using this unit.
You may be trying to refer to a vertical rhythm, which is a concept of maintaining text readability and should not be confused with the rest of the page layout.
For aesthetically pleasing rendering under different resolutions, you should look into fluid layouts - try playing with the browser width on that page. As you can see, the content flow is altered to make best use of space available, however the font size/line-height are not adjusted since the two techniques are independently implemented.