Chrome 57 released yesterday, not quite a week ahead of schedule, with Grid support enabled. So that’s two browsers with Grid support in the space of two days, including the most popular browser in the world right now. Safari has it enabled in Technology Preview builds, and just blogged an introduction to Grid, so it definitely feels like it’ll be landing there soon as well. No word from Edge, so far as I know.
I did discover a Chrome bug in Grid this morning, albeit one that might be fairly rare. I filed a bug report, but the upshot is this: most or all of an affected page is rendered, and then gets blanked. I ran into a similar bug earlier this year, and it seemed to affect people semi-randomly — others with the same OS as me didn’t see it, and others with different OSes did see it. This leads me to suspect it’s related to graphics cards, but I have no proof of that at all. If you can reproduce the bug, and more importantly come up with a reliable way to fix it, please comment on the Chromium bug!
I said yesterday I would write up the process of adding Grid to meyerweb, and I did. I started it last night and I finished it this morning, and when I was done with the first draft I discovered I’d written almost four thousand words.
So I pitched it to an online magazine, and they accepted, so it should be ready in the next couple of weeks. Probably not long after Chrome ships its Grid implementation into public release, in fact. I’ll certainly share the news when it’s available.
In the meantime, you can inspect live grids for yourself, whether here or at Grid by Example or The Experimental Layout Lab of Jen Simmons or wherever else. All you need is Firefox 52, though Firefox Nightly is recommended for reasons I’ll get to in a bit.
In Firefox 52, if you inspect an element that has display: grid assigned to it, you’ll get a little waffle icon in the inspector, like so:
Mmmmmm, waffles.
Click it, and Firefox will draw the grid lines on the page for you in a lovely shade of purple. It will even fill in grid gaps (which are a thing) with a crosshatch-y pattern. It’s a quick way to visualize what the grid’s template values are creating.
If you have Firefox Nightly, there’s an even more powerful tool at your disposal. First, go into the inspector’s settings, and make sure “Enable layout panel” is checked. You may or may not have to restart the browser at this point — I did, but YEMV — but once it’s up and running, there will be a “Layout” panel to go with the other panels on the right side of the Inspector. There you get the box model stuff, as well as a checklist of grids on the current page.
The Layout panel
For each grid on the page — not just the element you’re inspecting — you can set your own color for the gridlines, though those color choices do not currently persist, even across page reloads. You can also turn on number labels for the grid lines, which are currently tiny and black no matter what you do. And if you allow grid lines to extend into infinity, you can turn the page into a blizzard of multicolored lines, assuming there are several grids present.
This panel is very much in its infancy, so we can expect future enhancements. Things like color persistence and better grid line labels are already on the to-do list, I’m told, as well as several more ambitious features. Even as it is, I find it valuable in constructing new grids and diagnosing the situation when things go sideways. (Occasionally, literally sideways: I was playing with writing-mode in grid contexts today.)
There’s another, possibly simpler, way to enable the Layout panel, which I learned about courtesy Andrei Petcu. You type about:config into the URL bar, then enter layoutview into the search field. Double-click “devtools.layoutview.enabled” to set it to “true”, and it will be ready to go. Thanks, Andrei!
Grid is public. It’s live right now in the latest Firefox release, Firefox 52.
It will similarly be live in the next public Chrome release, due in the next week or so.
It’s here. I almost can’t believe it.
For well more than a decade now, when asked what CSS needs more than anything, I’ve said it needs real, actual layout. “A layout-shaped hole at its heart” is a phrase I may have used a fair few times.
Rachel Andrew had a great article last week about “Learning CSS Grid Layout”, which charts a sensible course for getting used to grid. It also busted a few myths about grid. I recommend it highly.
There’s one more myth I’d like to do my best to bust, which I’ll summarize as a comment I’ve seen many times: “Ugh, tables again?”
The underlying assumption here is: grids are just tables with a new syntax. This is entirely untrue.
I mean, yes, you can recreate 1990s-era table-based layout techniques with grid, in much the same way you can recreate the submit button with two JS libraries and a complex front-end framework. The ability to do it doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea.
(Though you might, from time to time, find the ability useful. Here’s what I mean: you can take a bunch of data contained in arbitrary markup someone else is producing, and lay it out in a tabular format. It would be far preferable to have the data in actual table markup, but if that’s not an option, grid will give you a potential solution.)
The way these are displayed is actually the inverse of their source order. I wanted them to be in document source such that the compositing steps were in chronological order, so that’s how I wrote them. Once I laid them out that way in the figure, using grid, I realized it made more sense to arrange them visually, with the bottom layer at the bottom of the figure, the next above that, all leading up to the result at the top.
So I just rearranged them on the grid, by assigning grid row numbers. The document source wasn’t touched. A bit simplified, the CSS to do that looked something like this:
ol li:nth-child(1) {grid-row: 4;}
ol li:nth-child(2) {grid-row: 3;}
ol li:nth-child(3) {grid-row: 2;}
ol li:nth-child(4) {grid-row: 1;}
Because the compositing examples (the “columns” in the layout) were represented as ordered lists, with the grid set up to place each image with some captioning, I could just change their order. So yes, it looks like a table, but the underlying structure is anything but table-like. Just to get each column of examples grouped together with tables, I’d have to nest tables, or accept a one-row table with each cell containing some other structure. Rearranging the columns would mean doing markup surgery, instead of just reassigning their layout placement via CSS.
Instead, I was able to represent the content in the best available structure (ordered lists) and then arrange them on a grid in the best way I could visually. For that matter, I could responsively change the layout from a six-column grid to a three-column grid to un-gridded lists as the viewport got more and more narrow. As, in fact, I did — check it out. If you make the window narrow enough, Grid is dropped entirely so you can see the base structure and content.
This ability to place grid items without respect to source order is a powerful tool, and like all powerful tools it can be used for good or ill. It’s possible to assemble a visually usable layout out of the most inaccessible, horrible markup structures imaginable. It’s also possible to assemble a visually usable layout from clean, accessible markup in ways we’ve never even dared dream.
Combine grids with other CSS features, and you can really create art. Jen Simmmons has a layout lab site, and her 2016 main-page design is… well, go see it in a grid-capable browser, like today’s release of Firefox. Realize it’s all text, no images, no scripting. Just markup and style.
And the style is remarkably simple for what’s being accomplished. It’s not too alien a syntax, but it will likely take some time to adjust to using it. It’s taken me some time, as I’ve experimented and written about it. Unlearning my float habits has taken some work, and I don’t know that I’m completely done. I do know that it’s been worth it many times over.
I’ve done a few experiments with the layout of a local copy of meyerweb, and done some frankly goofy things to the design along the way. I’m hoping to convert what’s up here to a simple grid layout in the next few days, make it a slightly more complex grid shortly after that, and then maybe — maybe — actually do some redesigning for the first time in over a decade, to take advantage of grid more fully. Jen has a great six-minute video exploring a few features of grid and the grid inspection tool now built into Firefox, which I recommend to anyone curious to know more.
So if you’re thinking of grid as tables 2.0, please, stop. Table-style layouts are the first one percent of what grid offers. There are works of art and undiscovered techniques waiting in the other 99 percent.
I’ve been working a lot with the clip-path property recently, as I write the chapter on filters, blends, clipping, and masking for CSS: The Definitive Guide’s long-delayed 4th edition (available now in early-release format!). One of the nifty things you can do with clipping paths is define them with percentage-based coordinates. For example, here’s a hexagon-like clipping path:
It didn’t work because, as I discovered to my horror, SVG does not allow percentage coordinates. I could just strip all the percent signs out, but that would be the same as saying this in CSS:
I didn’t want pixels, though. I want percentages, darn it all!
So I asked around on Twitter, and Markus Stange pointed me to the solution: converting all the SVG coordinates to the range 0–1 and using the clipPathUnits attribute. The working version looks like this:
That yields the same result as the polygon() CSS shape with the percentages I showed before.
All that is great if you’re writing your own SVG shapes and can make sure you set it up properly, but what if someone hands you a shape to be used as a clip path and it’s in absolute coordinates like 100 75? If you’re really lucky, the shape has a viewbox of 0 0 100 100 (or all the coordinate points are in that range) and you can just divide all the coordinate points by 100 to get the proper values. But that’s really tedious for any but the simplest of shapes, and besides, what if it has some other viewbox? That’s where the transform attribute saves the day.
For example, suppose you get an SVG file that looks like this (with the actual path coordinates removed because there are a lot of them):
Next, look at the viewBox attribute on the <svg> element itself. The value there is 329.6667 86. That means 329.6667 coordinate units horizontally, and 86 units vertically. So all you need to do now is divide all the horizontal values by 329.6667, and the vertical values by 86. Which would be super tedious, except we have scaling transforms at our disposal:
Those two values are 1/329.6667 and 1/86, respectively, and they effectively scale every point in the d attribute to fit into the needed 0–1 range. (That’s not precisely what happens, but the outcome is the same.) Thus we have an SVG clipping path that scales with the element and fits to its dimensions!
This works just as well for other markup patterns. To return to the hexlike path from before, assume it was written like this:
If that were applied as-is, via clip-path: url(#hexlike), it would create a hex-like clipping path that fits a 100px by 100px box, positioned in the top left of the element (in left-to-right languages, I presume). The quick fix:
Bingo bango bongo, it will now scale to the element’s dimensions, whatever those turn out to be.
Of course, if you apply that to something like a short paragraph, it will be verrrrry stretched out, but the same would be true with a percentage-based polygon() shape. The beauty here is that you can scale any coordinate set, so if you have a tiny path that you want to blow up, or a huge path you want to shrink down, you can transform it without using clipPathUnits to stretch it over the bounding box. Something like this:
That gets you a hexlike shape that fits a 400px by 400px box, for example.
Now all CSS needs is the ability to size and position clipping paths in a manner similar background images, and we’ll be in clover. I hope such properties are in the WG’s mind, because I’d love to be able to just point an at SVG clipping path, and then say something like clip-path-position: center; clip-path-size: contain;. That would remove the need for fiddling with SVG attributes altogether.
Thanks to Markus Stange for the technique and his invaluable assistance in proofreading this article.
Yesterday, I was looking at an existing page, wondering if it would be improved by rearranging some of the elements. I was about to fire up the git engine (spawn a branch, check it out, do edits, preview them, commit changes, etc., etc.) when I got a weird thought: could I just drag elements around in the Web Inspector in my browser of choice, Firefox Nightly, so as to quickly try out various changes without having to open an editor? Turns out the answer is yes, as demonstrated in this video!
Youtube: “Dragging elements in Firefox Nightly’s Web Inspector”
Since I recorded the video, I’ve learned that this same capability exists in public-release Firefox, and has been in Chrome for a while. It’s probably been in Firefox for a while, too. What I was surprised to find was how many other people were similarly surprised that this is possible, which is why I made the video. It’s probably easier to understand to video if it’s full screen, or at least expanded, but I think the basic idea gets across even in small-screen format. Share and enjoy!
I’m criminally behind in sharing this with everyone, so I’m jumping straight to the bottom line here: I’m teaching a workshop on advanced CSS layout techniques in October, and co-teaching another workshop on CSS animation in November with the inestimable Val Head. Both are courtesy O’Reilly & Associates, and will be conducted at their offices in Boston.
A few more details:
New CSS Layout (October 17-18) is two days of deep diving into flexbox, multicolumn, grid, and related technologies. There will be a heavy emphasis on Things You Can Use Today, including bugs and how to handle them, with a keen focus on using everything in a progressively enhancing way. In other words, you should walk away knowing how to use new technologies right away, without leaving behind users of older browsers, and have a good sense of what you’ll be able to do in the next 6-12 months. This will be hands-on, interactive, and very much a dialogue with technical instruction. If you’re looking for two days of watching me drone in front of a slide show, this is not that. I’m not even sure I’ll have any slides at all — I’ll probably spend the entire time in BBEdit and a browser instead. The class size is limited to 40 people.
CSS Animation (November 17-18) is another two days of diving deep into the topic. For this one, I’ll spend the first day going through every last piece of CSS transition and animation syntax, with generous helping of transform. On the second day, Val will show how to put that syntax to use in a way that serves and strengthens your design, instead of undermining it. It’s basically a day of learning how the tools work, and a day of learning how to properly use the tools. Again, class size of 40; and again, very much hands-on and interactive.
So that’s what’s up. Looking for ways to seriously expand your skills in layout or animation or both? Come, join us!
Grid layout is a pretty darned fantastic thing. I’ve been digging into it as I write the grid layout chapter of CSS:TDG4e, and there are more things in here than have been dreamt of in our layout philosophies. One of the things I’ve recently come to realize is the power and necessity of subgrids.
To understand why, let’s explore a use case, which you can see in various forms on this test page. I cribbed this use case pretty directly from Fantasai, but I’m going to be analyzing it a little differently. The basis is a form with the various fields and labels in unordered list items, to help with accessibility and to be basically readable and usable if the CSS somehow fails to be applied. The markup looks like this:
Ideally, we’d like the form fields to all line up into a column, and the labels to be in another column. Furthermore, we’d like the label column to be only as wide as the widest label’s element box, and no more; the rest of the grid can be taken up by the input column.
This seems like a case tailor-made for grid layout, but there’s a problem. Because grid items are only ever the child elements of a grid container, we can’t just apply a grid to the ul element and go from there. Instead, we have to make each li element a grid container, in order to make each label and input element a grid item. But that means each list item’s grid affects its children, with no reference to the other list items’ grids. We can write the template we want, like so:
form ul li {display: grid;
grid-template-columns: [start label] max-content [input] 1fr [end];}
Each list item a grid, but to what end?
That will get us a result almost precisely as if we’d applied no grids at all. The only difference is that the input elements will all be as wide as their columns, according to the CSS Grid specification. Chrome fails to do this last bit correctly, whereas Firefox Nightly gets it right, but otherwise the layout is essentially the same. You can see this in the #form1 example on the test page. (Remember, you have to have a current grid-supporting browser for the examples to correspond to what I’m talking about here.)
We can get closer to our goal by experimenting with a fixed-width grid column for the labels, figuring out the width of the widest label, and then just making all the label columns be that wide. That would be written something like this:
form ul li {display: grid;
grid-template-columns: [start label] 7em [input] 1fr [end];}
Using fixed-width columns to simulate a single column.
That works pretty well so long as none of the labels ever change — if a label is added (or edited) to be wider, it will wrap to multiple lines. Alternatively, if the longest label is dropped or edited to be shorter, the label column won’t resize down. It will just stay the same dumb fixed width until someone hand-adjusts it. And honestly, at that point I may as well be using flexbox, which would do this version of the layout just as well, and would be more widely supported for the near to intermediate future. At any rate, you can see the grid version of this in the #form2 example on the test page.
But what if we could set a grid on the ul element, and then make all the li elements grids that use their parents’ grid for the layout of their children? That’s exactly what subgrids do. This is the solution we’ve been seeking, in basic form:
form ul {display: grid;
grid-template-columns: [start label] max-content [input] 1fr [end];}
form ul li {display: grid; grid: subgrid; grid-column: start / end;}
Here the list items establish grid containers, thus making the label and input elements into grid items like before, but are stretched across the two columns of the ul while using those very grid lines for laying out their child elements, plus those children influence the placement of their grandparent’s grid lines. Thus, we can specify things like max-content for the label column size and have it Just Work™.
Or it would Just Work™, except that as I write this, none of the grid implementations have subgrid support. Authors who want to create the kind of layout we’re after have to compromise in one way or another — either by faking the content-sizing with a fixed-width column, or by stripping down the markup until there’s barely anything left — thus sacrificing accessibility, progressive enhancement, and general best practices, as Fantasai illustrated in her article.
You can probably see a lot of other ways in which subgrids would be useful. Take defining a full-page grid, the kind with a bunch of regularly repeating grid lines onto which various elements can be attached, like this one or this one. In this scenario, being able to designate each section of the page a subgrid would let you have all the pieces inside that section participate in, and lay out in relation to, the overall page grid. Without subgrids, you’d either have to make every element you want to lay out a child of the body element (or whatever you used to create the page grid), or you’d have to recreate segments of the page grid in each nested grid, and give up any hope of columns that can flex with the contents of multiple page sections. Neither solution is appealing.
This is why I’ve come to the same conclusion other grid experts (like Rachel) already have: subgrids are a major component of grid layout, and should be a part of any grid layout implementation when it emerges from developer-preview status. If that means delaying the emergence of grids, I think it’s worth it.
I say that because our field has a tendency to glom onto the first iteration of a technology, learn it inside out, hack around its limitations, and then ignore any future improvements unless somehow forced to do so. If grid layout is released without subgrid support, we’re risking shoving subgrids into the back of the author-practices cupboard for a long time to come. And along with it, potentially, grids themselves. The frustration of trying to build layouts without subgrids will quickly become overwhelming for all but the simplest cases, leading authors to try and then discard grids as a serious tool.
First impressions matter. CSS itself suffered for years from the initial impressions designers formed of “boring, boxy” layouts, and it still suffers from the handicap of being a presentation system without a layout engine at its core. Grid layout is the first serious candidate to fill that hole in the past two decades, and I don’t want to see them hamstrung from the outset. Subgrids are essential to the adoption of grids. I hope they’ll be implemented as soon as possible, and before grids are pushed into public release channels.
The Graphical Command Line Interpreter (GCLI) has been removed from Firefox, but screenshot has been revived as :screenshot in the Web Console (⌥⌘K), with most of the same options discussed below. Thus, portions of this article have become incorrect as of August 2018. Read about the changes in my post Firefox’s :screenshot Command.
Everyone has their own idiosyncratic collection of tools they can’t work without, and I’ve recently been using one of mine as I produce figures for CSS: The Definitve Guide, Fourth Edition (CSS:TDG4e). It’s Firefox’s command-line screenshot utility.
To get access to screenshot, you first have to hit ⇧F2 for the Developer Toolbar, not⌥⌘K for the Web Console. (I know, two command lines — who thought that was a good idea? Moving on.) Once you’re in the Developer Toolbar, you can type s and then hit Tab to autocomplete screenshot. Then type a filename for your screenshot, if you want to define it, either with or without the file extension; otherwise you’ll get whatever naming convention your computer uses for screen captures. For example, mine does something like Screen Shot 2015-10-22 at 10.05.51.png by default. If you hit [return] (or equivalent) at this point, it’ll save the screenshot to your Downloads folder (or equivalent). Done!
Except, don’t do that yet, because what really makes screenshot great is its options; in my case, they’re what elevate screenshot from useful to essential, and what set it apart from any screen-capture addon I’ve ever seen.
The option I use a lot, particularly when grabbing images of web sites for my talks, is --fullpage. That option captures absolutely everything on the page, even the parts you can’t see in the browser window. See, by default, when you use screenshot, it only shows you the portion of the page visible in the browser window. In many cases, that’s all you want or need, but for the times you want it all, --fullpage is there for you. Any time you see me do a long scroll of a web page in a talk, like I did right at the ten-minute mark of my talk at Fluent 2015, it was thanks to --fullpage.
If you want the browser --chrome to show around your screenshot, though, you can’t capture the --fullpage. Firefox will just ignore the -fullpage option if you invoke --chrome, and give you the visible portion of the page surrounded by your browser chrome, including all your addon icons and unread tabs. Which makes some sense, I admit, but part of me wishes someone had gone to the effort of adding code to redraw the chrome all the way around a --fullpage capture if you asked for it.
Now, for the purposes of CSS:TDG4e’s figures, there are two screenshot options that I cannot live without.
I captured this using screenshot fb-trend --selector '#u_0_l'. That saved exactly what you see to fb-trend.png.
The first is --selector, which lets you supply a CSS selector to an element — at which point, Firefox will capture just that element and its descendants. The only, and quite understandable, limitation is that the selector you supply must match a single element. For me, that’s usually just --selector 'body', since every figure I create is a single page, and there’s nothing in the body except what I want to include in the figure. So instead of trying to drag-select a region of the screen with ⇧⌘4, or (worse) trying to precisely size the browser window to show just the body element and not one pixel more, I can enter something like screenshot fig047 --selector 'body' and get precisely what I need.
That might seem like a lot to type every time, but the thing is, I don’t have to: not only does the Web Toolbar have full tab-autocomplete, the Toolbar also offers up-arrow history. So once I’ve tab-completed the command to capture my first figure, I just use the up arrow to bring the command back and change the file name. Quick, simple, efficient.
The second essential option for me is --dpr, which defines a device pixel ratio. Let’s say I want to capture something at four times the usual resolution. --dpr 4 makes it happen. Since all my figures are meant to go to print as well as ebooks, I can capture at print-worthy resolutions without having to use ⌘+ to blow up the content, or fiddle with using CSS to make everything bigger. Also if I want to go the other way and capture a deliberately pixellated version of a page, I can use something like --dpr 0.33.
I have used this occasionally to size down an image online: I “View Image” to get it in its own window, then use screenshot with a fractional DPR value to shrink it. Yes, this is a rare use case, even for me, but hey — the option exists! I haven’t used the DPR option for my talks, but given the growing use of HD 16:9 projectors — something we’ve been using at An Event Apart for a while now, actually — I’m starting to lean toward using --dpr 2 to get sharper images.
(Aside: it turns out this option is only present in very recent versions of Firefox, such as Developer Edition 43 and the current Nightlies. So if you need DPR, grab a Nightly and go crazy!)
A snippet of an image I captured using --dpr 5. On-screen, the page was at 100% zoom, 16-pixel (browser default) text sizing. The resulting capture was 4000×2403 pixels.
And that’s not all! You can set a --delay in seconds, to make sure a popup menu or other bit of interaction is visible before the capture happens. If you want to take your captured image straight into another program before saving it, there’s --clipboard. And there’s an option to upload straight to --imgur, though I confess I haven’t figured out how that one works. I suspect you have to be logged into imgur first. If anyone knows, please leave a comment so the rest of us know how to use it!
The one thing that irks me a little bit about screenshot is that the file name must come before the options. When I’m producing a bunch of figures in a row, having to drag-select just the file name for replacement is a touch tedious; I wish I could put the file name at the end of the command, so I could quickly drag-select it with a rightward wrist-flick. But all things considered, this is a pretty minor gripe. Well, shut my mouth and paint me red — it turns out you can put the filename after the options. Either that wasn’t possible at some point and I never retested the assertion, or it was always possible and I just messed up. Either way, this irk is irksome no more!
The other thing I wish screenshot could do is let me define a precise width or height in pixels — or, since I’m dreaming, a value using any valid CSS length unit — and scale the result to that measure. This isn’t really useful for the CSS:TDG4e figures, but it could come in pretty handy for creating talk slides. No, I have no idea how that would interact with the DPR option, but I’d certainly be willing to find out.
So that’s one of my “unusual but essential” tools. What’s yours?
