Bodrov Ilya - CSS grid layout 5 practical projects

Copyright 2017 SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

• Cover Design: Natalia Balska

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

The author and publisher have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of the information herein. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors and SitePoint Pty. Ltd., nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages to be caused either directly or indirectly by the instructions contained in this book, or by the software or hardware products described herein.

Rather than indicating every occurrence of a trademarked name as such, this book uses the names only in an editorial fashion and to the benefit of the trademark owner with no intention of infringement of the trademark.

Published by SitePoint Pty. Ltd.

48 Cambridge Street Collingwood
VIC Australia 3066
Web: www.sitepoint.com
Email: books@sitepoint.com

SitePoint specializes in publishing fun, practical, and easy-to-understand content for web professionals. Visit http://www.sitepoint.com/ to access our blogs, books, newsletters, articles, and community forums. Youll find a stack of information on JavaScript, PHP, design, and more.

Layout in CSS has always been a tricky task: hacking solutions using positioning, floats, and the one-dimensional flexbox has never been very satisfactory. Fortunately, there is a new tool to add to our arsenal: CSS Grid Layout. It is an incredibly powerful layout system that allows us to design pages using a two-dimensional grid - offering the kind of fine-grained layout control that print designers take for granted!

Grid Layouts been in development for a while, but has recently been made a W3C candidate recommendation and has been added to most of the major browsers, so is ready for prime time.

This short selection of tutorials, hand-picked from SitePoints HTML & CSS channel, will get you up and running with Grid Layout and using it in your own sites in no time.

Youll notice that weve used certain layout styles throughout this book to signify different types of information. Look out for the following items.

Code in this book is displayed using a fixed-width font, like so:

As web applications become more and more complex, we need a more natural way to do advanced layouts easily without hacky solutions that use floats and other less burdensome techniques. An exciting new solution for creating layouts comes with the CSS Grid Layout Module.

In this introductory tutorial, Ill introduce you to this relatively new CSS feature and Ill show you using some examples how the CSS Grid Layout Module works.

The core idea behind the Grid Layout is to divide a web page into columns and rows, along with the ability to position and size the building block elements based on the rows and columns we have created in terms of size, position, and layer.

The grid also gives us a flexible way to change the position of elements with only CSS without any change to the HTML. This can be used with media queries to alter the layout at different breakpoints.

Lets start with an example to see the power of Grid Layout, and then Ill explain some new concepts in more detail.

Imagine you want to create a Twitter app with four full height columns layout (Tweets, Replies, Search, and Messages), something abstracted and similar to the screenshot below.

Here is our HTML:

Then we will apply some CSS to the .app-layout container element:

View a demo here

Here is the explanation of what weve done in the previous CSS:

1. Set the display property to grid.
2. Divide the container element into four columns, each column is 1fr (one fraction) of the free space within the grid container.
3. Create one row and set the height to be 100vh (full viewport height).

As you can see, the Grid Layout Module adds a new value to the display property which is grid. The grid value is responsible for setting the .app-layout element to be a grid container, which also establishes a new grid formatting context for its contents. This property is required to start using Grid Layout.

The grid-template-columns property specifies the width of each grid column within the Grid, and in our case it divides the .app-layout container to four columns; each one is 1fr (25%) of the available space.

The grid-template-rows specifies the height of each grid row, and in our example we only created one row at 100vh.

A layout with two columns and two rows would look like this:

And we would use the following CSS:

View a demo here

We can also achieve the above example only on small screens by wrapping the code inside a media query. This opens up a great opportunity for us to customize the layout differently in different viewports. For example, we can create the previous layout only on viewports under 1024px as follows:

View a demo here

Now that youve seen a simple example, there are some new concepts that Id like to cover to give you a better understanding of Grid Layout. Although there are a lot of new concepts, I will only take a look at a few of them.