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What the FlexBox? – A free 20 video course to learn CSS Flexbox

flexbox.io

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Re: What the FlexBox? – A free 20 video course to learn CSS Flexbox

#51

Post by kozak »

SonicSoul wrote: post #21
kozak wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of cases (especially in the enterprise, where requirements can be tightly controlled) when non-Edge versions of IE can be safely dropped. I'm working on such a project right now, we use flexbox very extensively.

interesting. are you also supporting mobile devices? any issues with iOS or Android to consider? I am considering flexbox but have to worry about supporting above. Luckily we don't have legacy IE to worry about so am hopeful. according to this [0] ie 10 and 11 are supported but with "partial support"? [0] http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

We're developing a desktop-like single page application, so our testing on mobile is very limited. But I don't see any major issues on the few devices that we have, and caniuse.com confirms that problems are not anticipated (at least with some autoprefixing).

Re: What the FlexBox? – A free 20 video course to learn CSS Flexbox

#52

Post by blowski »

Someone1234 wrote: post #14

Even if you know Flexbox you cannot use Flexbox because support lacks. http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox The TL;DR: Everyone is doing well except IE which is horribly broken. Only Microsoft's Edge browser has good Flexbox support, but nobody uses Edge, so therefore Flexbox is still no-go. Come back in five years when IE 11 is a distant memory and Edge is popular.

I've used it on 4 sites in the last year, with no problems.

It does depend on your target market, but then, so does everything.

Re: What the FlexBox? – A free 20 video course to learn CSS Flexbox

#54

Post by furyferret »

vanderZwan wrote: post #2

As someone who has little direct experience with this part of webdev (other than aligning paragraphs once in a while for really basic static text sites), I have to wonder: is the fact that flexbox requires a 20-part video course a sign of it being: - a broken mess, - a less broken mess than what came before it, - an inevitable consequence of trying to solve an inherently difficult and complicated problem? - some comb…

It's just web developers who lived in a world where front-end layout was supposed to be hard and who distill complexity out of four or five trivial CSS properties to convince themselves that all of the hours they lost aligning divs with floats or bootstrap weren't pointless, and that the new way must be as complicated.

Re: What the FlexBox? – A free 20 video course to learn CSS Flexbox

#55

Post by Animats »

jasonkostempski wrote: post #30
vanderZwan wrote: post #2

As someone who has little direct experience with this part of webdev (other than aligning paragraphs once in a while for really basic static text sites), I have to wonder: is the fact that flexbox requires a 20-part video course a sign of it being: - a broken mess, - a less broken mess than what came before it, - an inevitable consequence of trying to solve an inherently difficult and complicated problem? - some comb…

Dynamic layout is a hard problem. I've never come across a layout engine that didn't require at least a day to get comfortable with. Some may have the advantage of being similar to something you've used before and might give you a head start but that can also slow you down when you assumed it's exactly like the other when it's not.

If you want to see a completely different approach to dynamic layout that makes more sense, check out the constraint system in the 2D sketch system of Autodesk Inventor. It's all visual, controlled through a GUI; you select two points or two lines or a point and line and apply constraints such as "coincident" or "perpendicular" or "parallel" or "tangent". You can also give things explicit dimensions, which may be computed from other dimensions. The GUI stops you if you try to insert incompatible constraints. You can put in text, too, so you can actually use it as a layout engine. There's no notion of "line break", though; it won't change the number of things in a row if you change the outer bounding width.

This is much more comfortable for designers than trying to do it through a set of declarations with no consistency checking. A constraint engine really is the right tool for the job. It also maps well to a GUI, which CSS does not.

The constraint system isn't limited to horizontal and vertical. You can have circles, arcs, and even splines. Graphic designers would love to have such capabilities in web design.

Re: What the FlexBox? – A free 20 video course to learn CSS Flexbox

#57

Post by jordanlev »

woah wrote: post #39
jordanlev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the web's greatest features is progressive enhancement. So you can (and in my opinion should) use flexbox now as it has pretty decent browser support -- just make sure there is a decent fallback to something that is not-as-visually-perfect-but-still-decent (such as ye old float-based layout or display:table).

Doesn't that negate the point of flexbox which is that it's better and easier for building interfaces? If you have to build it in flexbox then build it again in floats, why build it in flexbox at all?

Good point, and I'm not sure how to articulate this (which might mean I have some reconsideration to do)... but I feel like I don't need to sweat the details as much on the fallback? Like, if it looks perfect with flexbox and decent-but-not-perfect (but critically, the content is available and readable/accessible) with the fallback, I'm totally ok with that.

Re: What the FlexBox? – A free 20 video course to learn CSS Flexbox

#59

Post by kelvin0 »

vanderZwan wrote: post #2

As someone who has little direct experience with this part of webdev (other than aligning paragraphs once in a while for really basic static text sites), I have to wonder: is the fact that flexbox requires a 20-part video course a sign of it being: - a broken mess, - a less broken mess than what came before it, - an inevitable consequence of trying to solve an inherently difficult and complicated problem? - some comb…

Every time I finally resolve to start doing some Web Front-end stuff, I have the same reasoning as you put forth ... and I go back to coding my frontend in wxPython. I just don't know where to start, and nothing seems to last more than a few weeks until a shinier thing pops up... I need help!
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