Understanding Layout Algorithms
Josh is great at explaining tricky concepts and here he’s really set himself a challenge: explaining layout modes in CSS.
Link tags: flexbox
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How Flexbox Works
A really deep dive into flexbox. This is a great example of what I categorise as “thinking like a browser” (a skill I recommend for any front-end developer).
Modern CSS in a Nutshell - Cloud Four
I like this high-level view of the state of CSS today. There are two main takeaways:
- Custom properties, flexbox, and grid are game-changers.
- Pre- and post-processers are becoming less and less necessary.
This is exactly the direction we should be going in! More and more power from the native web technologies (while still remaining learnable), with less and less reliance on tooling. For CSS, the tools have been like polyfills that we can now start to remove.
Alas, while the same should be true of JavaScript (there’s so much you can do in native JavaScript now), people seem to have tied their entire identities to the tooling they use.
They could learn a thing or two from the trajectory of CSS: treat your frameworks as cattle, not pets.
SmolCSS
Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components.
Learn Box Alignment
A cute walkthrough for flexbox and grid.
The Thought Process Behind a Flexbox Layout | CSS-Tricks
This is such a great way to explain a technology! Chris talks through his thought process when using flexbox for layout.
Understanding the Albatross - Snook.ca
Jonathan shares his notes on that great flexbox container queries article from Heydon that I linked to.
The Flexbox Holy Albatross | HeydonWorks
Er …I think Heydon might’ve cracked it. And by “it”, I mean container queries.
This is some seriously clever thinking involving CSS custom properties, calc, and flexbox. The end result is a component that can respond to its container …and nary a media query in sight!
Your Brain on Front-End Development | CSS-Tricks
I find this soooo relatable:
I know when I look at a design (heck, even if I know I’m not going to be building it), my front-end brain starts triggering all sorts of things I know will be related to the task.
Difference is, Chris comes up with some very, very clever techniques.
Getting Started With CSS Layout — Smashing Magazine
Rachel gives a terrific explanation of CSS layout from first principles, starting with the default normal flow within writing systems, moving on to floats, then positioning—relative, absolute, fixed, and sticky—then flexbox, and finally grid (with a coda on alignment). This is a great primer to keep bookmarked; I think I’ll find myself returning to this more than once.
Grid to Flex
Una has put together this handy one-pager of flexbox fallbacks for some common grid layouts.
Best Practices With CSS Grid Layout — Smashing Magazine
A great set of answers from Rachel to frequently asked questions about CSS grid. She addresses the evergreen question of when to use flexbox and when to use grid:
I tend to use Flexbox for components where I want the natural size of items to strongly control their layout, essentially pushing the other items around.
A sign that perhaps Flexbox isn’t the layout method I should choose is when I start adding percentage widths to flex items and setting
flex-growto 0. The reason to add percentage widths to flex items is often because I’m trying to line them up in two dimensions (lining things up in two dimensions is exactly what Grid is for).
CSS Grid Gotchas And Stumbling Blocks – Smashing Magazine
A great practical article from Rachel answering some frequently asked questions about—what else?—CSS Grid.
Basic grid layout with fallbacks using feature queries
A really nice example of progressive enhancement: creating a layout with inline-block, then flexbox, then Grid.
Questioning Container Queries / Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul’s being contrary again.
Seriously though, this is a good well-reasoned post about why container queries might not be the the all-healing solution for our responsive design problems. Thing is, I don’t think container queries are trying to be an all-encompassing solution, but rather a very useful solution for one particular class of problem.
So I don’t really see container queries competing with, say, grid layout (any more than grid layout is competing with flexbox), but rather one more tool that would be really useful to have in our arsenal.
CSS Grid. One layout method not the only layout method
Grid is only a replacement for float-based layout, where float-based layout it being used to try and create a two-dimensional grid. If you want to wrap text around an image, I’d suggest floating it.
Grid is only a replacement for flexbox if you have been trying to make flexbox into a two-dimensional grid. If you want to take a bunch of items and space them out evenly in a single row, use flexbox.
CSS Grid, Flexbox And Box Alignment: Our New System For Web Layout – Smashing Magazine
Rachel provides an in-depth comparison between flexbox and grid layout: what they have in common, and what their respective strengths are.
Don’t forget to enable the experiment web features flag in your browser if you want to see the examples in action.
Flex-grow 9999 Hack
This is an unintuitive—but very handy—use of of the flex-grow property. The use-case outlined here is fairly common.
Part 3: We might not need quantity queries thanks to Flexbox | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer
I love the way that Charlotte is documenting her learning process. In this third part of the quantity queries + flexbox saga, it turns out that flexbox is capable of doing the magic all by itself!
Quantity queries and Flexbox part 2 | Charlotte Jackson, Front-end developer
This is so great! Charlotte takes two previous ideas she’s been writing about (quantity queries and flexbox) and puts them together in a new way.
It took me a while to get around what the nth-child selectors are doing here, but Charlotte does such great job of explaining the CSS that even I could understand it.