…In the run-up to Grid support being released to the public, I was focused on learning and teaching Grid, creating test cases, and using it to build figures for publication. And then, March 7th, 2017, it shipped to the public in Firefox 52. I tweeted and posted an article and demo I’d put together the night before, and sat back in wonderment that the day had finally come to pass. After 20+ years of CSS, finally, a real layout system, a set of properties and values designed from the outset for that purpose.
And then I decided, more or less in that moment, to convert my personal site to use Grid for its main-level layout.
As I’ve said before, I understand being hesitant. Based on our field’s history, it’s natural to assume that Grid as it stands now is buggy, incomplete, and will have a long ramp-up period before it’s usable. I am here to tell you, as someone who was there for almost all of that history, Grid is different. There are areas of incompleteness, but they’re features that haven’t been developed yet, not bugs or omissions. I’m literally using Grid in production, right now, on this site, and the layout is fine in both Grid browsers and non-Grid browsers (as the article describes). I’m very likely to add it to our production styles over at An Event Apart in the near future. I’d probably have done so already, except every second of AEA-related work time I have is consumed by preparations for AEA Seattle (read: tearing my new talk apart and putting it back together with a better structure).
Again, I get being wary. I do. We’re used to new CSS stuff taking two years to get up to usefulness. Not this time. It’s ready right now.
That converting-meyerweb-to-Grid article I’ve mentioned previously is still coming along (3,999 words as of the last draft, and I realized last night it needs another few hundred) and I think it will be out within a week. I’ll do my best! In the meantime, I’d like to point you to a few resources from the end of the article, plus do a tiny bit of self-promotion.
Resources first! If you’re wondering what Grid means for Flexbox, Chen Hui Jing has a lovely piece on “Grid + Flexbox: the best 1-2 punch in web layout”. Just the right length, with live Codepens, this is a very good introduction to using Grid and Flexbox in harmony. Some of what’s described there won’t be as necessary in the future, as Flexbox-style alignment migrates to Grid, but in the meantime Hui Jing explores the current state of the art with elegance.
If you have Firefox or Chrome and they’re updated to the latest release (FF52, C57) then I strongly encourage you to set aside a few minutes and go browse The Experimental Layout Lab of Jen Simmons. Jen’s been creating Grid demonstrations and experiments for well over a year now, and there are some really great examples there, summarizing some common design patterns and showing how Grid can make them much simpler and more robust. I especially recommend the 2016 home page, which combines CSS Grid, writing modes, transforms, and design history to create something really great (try resizing to see the responsive coolness). But don’t stop there!
If you like your learning in motion, Rachel Andrew’s video series introducing Grid concepts and properties is fabulous. As an application developer — she’s part of the Perch CMS team — she’s been excited about Grid and what it can do longer than just about anyone. Her deep technical skills and teaching abilities really come together in the video series. If you prefer to read up on Grid, then Rachel’s written a series of articles for the Mozilla Developer Network that cover similar ground.
Finally, if you like extended technical explanations of every Grid property and value seasoned with lots of examples and screenshots, then I suggest picking up the Early Access version of CSS: The Definitive Guide, 4th Edition. Estelle Weyl and I have been working on finishing this for a while now, and it’s just about ready: there are three chapters still to be added. They’ve already been written, but haven’t quite finished first editorial review and production massaging. But: the Grid chapter is already available, so if you get the book now, you’ll have instant access to something like 25,000 words going through Grid property by property. And also a whooooole lot more words covering everything else in CSS. (The current page count estimate for the book is 950. Nine hundred fifty. Yoinks.)
I mentioned late last week, in my post about Chrome 57 having landed Grid layout, that there is a bug that affects some people. Well, further investigation has revealed that the bug doesn’t seem to be in the Grid layout engine. Instead, disabling selected extensions makes the bug go away.
The odd part is that the extension seems to vary. In my case, disabling Window Resizer fixed the problem. Before you think it’s all their fault, though, Rachel Andrew discovered that disabling Window Resizer in her copy of Chrome did not solve the problem. For her, it was disabling the LastPass extension that did it. I don’t even have the LastPass extension installed on my machine, in any browser.
So: if you run into this problem, try disabling extensions to see if that fixes it. If so, you can enable them one at a time and test to see which one triggers the bug. With any luck, a fix will be found soon and deployed via auto-updating. And if you find out anything else, please let us know on the bug report!
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.
I ran into an interesting conceptual dilemma yesterday while I was building a test page for the filter property. In a way, it reminded me a bit of Dan Cederholm’s classic SimpleQuizzes, even though it’s not about HTML.
First, a bit of background. When I set up test suites, directories of example files, or even browser-based figures for a book, I tend to follow a pattern of having all the HTML (or, rarely, XML) files in a single directory. Inside that directory, I’ll have subdirectories containing the style sheets, images, fonts, and so on. I tend to call these c/, i/, and f/, but imagine they’re called css/, images/, and fonts/ if that helps. The names aren’t particularly important — it’s the organizational structure that matters here.
So, with that groundwork in place, here’s what happened: I wrote some SVG filters, and put them into an SVG file for referencing via the url(filters.svg#fragment) filter function pattern. So I had this SVG file that didn’t actually visually render anything; it was just a collection of filters to be applied via CSS.
I clicked-and-held the mouse button, preparing to drag the file into a subdirectory…and suddenly stopped. Where should I put it? css/, or images/? It clearly wasn’t CSS. Even if I were to rename css/ to styles/, are filter definitions really styles? I’m not sure they are. But then, what is an image that has no visual output?
(Insert “one hand clapping” reference here.)
Sure, I could set up an svg/ subdirectory, but then I’d just end up with SVG images (as in, SVGs that actually have visual output) mingled in with the filter-file… and furthermore, segregated from all the other images, the PNGs and JPGs still hanging out in images/. That seems weird.
I could establish a filters/ subdirectory, but that seems like overkill when I only planned to have a single file containing all the filters; and besides, I’m not in the habit of creating subdirectories that relate to only a single HTML file.
I could dodge the whole question by establishing a generic assets/ subdirectory, although I’ve long been of the opinion assets/, when it isn’t used to toss in all of your assets classes in their own subdirectories, is just a fancy alias for misc/. And I dislike tossing stuff into misc/, the messy kitchen junk drawer of any project.
I came to a decision in the end, but I’m not going to tell you what it was, because I’m curious: what would you do in that situation?
