Finley, I am.

Blog

#css

#grid

Experiments in CSS Grid #bbd17

Two years ago when Web Tools was released, CSS Grid was not supported in its current form by any browser. Now it is supported by all of them. But, in my opinion, unlike most features of CSS that have come before, Grid needs some good tooling around it to help ease work with it in development. So I have started to work on some tools to help with Grid and along the way, I have been dabbling a lot with Grid.

Below is a basic experiment: reproduce the layout of the new App Store on iOS. Along the way, I also found good use for CSS Custom Properties — Variables. I hate that they aren’t called variables. — in setting the background of articles, the background and text color of the text block on each, and more.

CSS is getting more and more powerful. But, along the way, it is getting more and more simple. Where old layout techniques (tables, floats, flex box) were truly ill-suited for layout, CSS Grid is 100% made for layout. So go, dabble with Grid. Grab a comic book and reproduce the layout. Or a poster from the 70’s. Learn the ins-and-outs of it because this is the future of where front-end web development and web design is.

Declining Complexity in CSS

But the core principles and mechanisms [of CSS] are no more complicated than they were a decade or even two decades ago. If anything, they’re easier to grasp now, because we don’t have to clutter our minds with float behaviors or inline layout just to try to lay out a page. Flexbox and Grid (chapters 12 and 13, by the way) make layout so much simpler than ever before, while simultaneously providing far more capability than ever before.

Eric Meyer

I built my first couple of layouts with Grid over the last weeks. Hot dog. Things that would have taken me forever with floats took me just a couple lines of code with Grid. I’ve been using Flexbox for a while, to the point of mostly knowing the syntax, but Grid is a brand new beast.

It is astonishing that we have, for almost 20 years of CSS, never had a native layout system. Now we do. Instead of complex (and large) libraries like Bootstrap, we can now do complex layout with simple syntax. Hell, we can do far more complex, asymmetric and two-dimensional layout with Grid that we would never consider doing before. A renaissance in web design is coming. But are front-end developers up to snuff?