One of the arguments I've heard about blueprint css is that it lets you think of your layout in terms of a grid rather than in terms of floats. This seems like a big advantage to me because I always get confused about where my floats are going to end up - sometimes a float will unexpectedly drop down below some other floats and I have a hard time figuring out how to reposition everything. Does this make blueprint css a good choice for me - or should I just put the time in to learn how to use floats properly and do all of my layouts manually?
Yes, absolutely it lets you use a grid - see this example page, which makes the grid visible by striping the background according to the grid columns.
(But I have to say, a little time spent learning how CSS layout really works would pay big dividends - better to understand it than to give up and try to work around it. And you'll then have the option of creating flexible layouts that work well on all sorts of different devices.)
One of the biggest issued with anything that is absolutely positioned is that items that are not absolutely positioned do not know that the absolutely positioned items exist.
Of course this is a debate that will go on forever about which is better but you will probably be better off using elements that can be scaled depending on the browser size and resolution.
Under the hood, Blueprint still uses floats.
Here's a novel approach to creating "float-less" layouts that are semantic and accessble,
http://www.tjkdesign.com/articles/css-layout/no_div_no_float_no_clear_no_hack_no_joke.asp
As stated, BluePrint is a grid system, but is based on CSS floats. So understanding CSS Floats is somewhat important to really grasp what BluePrint does.
I rarely use floats over absolute positioning for a variety of reasons.
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.
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!
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'd like to get some feedback on using padding and margins for page layout versus absolute positioning. I realize that there are and will be scenarious where either or both are preferred and that will depend on the scenario.
But what I'm getting at is overall page layout for pixel perfect designs what is the general rule of thumb? I'm a little more than a year into HTML and CSS and I'm coming from a graphic design background, so most of my train of thought lies heavily on approaching a design from a layout standpoint first. So far in my web designs I have used the rule of thumb to use appropriately titled divs with floats, padding and margins when laying out a page, and if something requires absolute positioning (like an element to be stuck on the edge of the screen or a div) use it when necessary.
But lately I've really been starting to re-think my approach to page layout and wondering if starting with usign absolute positioning as a general rule of thumb is a better idea?
Can somebody point out some good articles or resources on this topic, and I'd love to hear everyone's personal feedback as well.
I can see where you're coming from, but using absolute positioning for your layout is extremely inflexible. I think you'd be best to carry on as you are, using the CSS box model. That's not to say absolute positioning is a bad thing, just that it's not flexible enough to handle fluid layouts, changing box-sizes etc.
I've been learning more and more about CSS layout and its quirks over the last 2 years and I am pretty much using the float/margin technique as it seems to give me the best results across different browsers.
Maybe it was just the way I was doing it, but I have experienced some pain with positioning (absolute inside relative containers) when trying to get the same results in all browsers. IE was usually the outlier and that was mostly with IE6/7. I have hesitations with going straight to absolute positioning, but perhaps others here might have had a better experience and can point you in a better direction.
Good luck and I hope you find something that feels comfortable to you!
As Rowan mentioned, absolute position is to inflexible with all the different devices and screensizes.
What you should do, especially if you come from a graphic background, is using a grid layout in your website designing process that corresponds to a grid framework for webpages, for example bootstrap.
Then you'll get
A: Symmetric and appealing layout
B: Someone that knows this a lot better than any of us that has handled all the problems that floats and margins might cause and that will update the framework in the future to compensate for the turns web development is taking.
Can we make cross browser css layouts with CSS positioning, without using float? What are the bad and good points of usin css positioning over Float+margin+padding? I want to make layout compatible with all A-Grade Browser and with IE6 Also? IN dreamweaver we have a layer functionaliy to make css layout quickly but it's uses absolution position. is this technique bad?
If you don't care how it looks if the browser is larger or smaller than you designed for then absolute positioning it great. :)
But, in most cases, if you are designing for a browser that may be on a 17" - 30" monitors, so it may be fullscreen, then float is helpful.
Now, if you are changing the positions to scale to the size of the window dynamically, and can handle a resize, then absolute will work well.
I think absolute positioning would be more work than it is worth, if you want to get rid of float.
When I put together a page, I consider the elements I am putting together and the kind of physical structure they form. If elements are lined up together, like a row of books, I will use floats to "press" them up against one another. If I have more sparse elements, like post-it notes on a sheet of paper, I will use absolute positioning because the position of one element is not closely tied to the position of another.
I also look at what I know about the elements and what I don't. If I have things that change in size, like elements with varying amounts of content in them, I will use floats to position them. This way the elements still "stack" up together in some orderly fashion. Positioning an element of arbitrary size can be tricky, since you can end up exceeding a container's boundaries and breaking a layout or displaying/hiding some content in a place you don't want it.
Of course, you can combine the two techniques together, too - it's all about what you need to put together.
Can we make cross browser css layouts with CSS positioning, without using float?
Certainly, if you like. Floats and positioning are just two more CSS properties, they are not mutually exclusive. For complex layouts you may often be mixing both.
IN dreamweaver we have a layer functionaliy to make css layout quickly but it's uses absolution position. is this technique bad?
Yes. Except for things that are naturally fixed-size like images, using exact page-pixel absolute positioning is a bad move, one that automated tools tend to produce because it's easy to do with a WYSIWYG interface but one which degrades badly for text.