Preparing for CSS grids

I was just listening to "The Web Ahead" podcast where they were talking about the upcoming CSS grid system. If you can spare the time, go and take a listen (episode 114). Upcoming in the sense that there is a spec, but it's not yet mainstream - you can enable it through a flag in WebKit based browsers; use Firefox nightly (e.g I'm on Chrome 51 and it seems to be available). So you can't use it in your production applications just yet - soon'ish.

So, to get started (if using Chrome), you will want to enable experimental web platform features:



You can see the current working draft here - https://www.w3.org/TR/css-grid-1/

It's worth taking note of the motivation behind this. If you look for CSS layouts, you will see a bunch of solutions (probably involving floats) but using techniques not really designed for a full page layout.

Let's get started making a grid. The containing element should have a display property of either grid or inline-grid.

Without specifying any column widths, when placing elements on the same row, the column widths will be of equal widths.

As per:

<div id="gridContainer">
  <div id="col1">one</div>
  <div id="col2">two</div>
  <div id="col3">three</div>
</div>

<style type="text/css">
#gridContainer {
  display: grid;
}

#col1 {
  grid-column: 1;
  background-color:lightgreen;
}

#col2 {
  grid-column: 2;
  background-color:lightcyan;
}

#col3 {
  grid-column: 3;
  background-color:lightsalmon;
}
</style>


Output:



You may want span elements over multiple columns - in that case, imagine numbered lines for each column. Values are separated with a forward slash (/), and here you would specify the starting column  line and the ending column line. Alternatively, we can specify the number columns to span, prefixed with the span keyword

If we update the CSS to:

#gridContainer {
  display: grid;
}

#col1 {
  grid-row: 1;
  grid-column: 1 / 2;
  background-color:lightgreen;
}

#col2 {
  grid-row: 2;
  grid-column: 1 / 3;
  background-color:lightcyan;
}

#col3 {
  grid-row: 3;
  grid-column: 1 / 4;
  background-color:lightsalmon;
}

or

#gridContainer {
  display: grid;
}

#col1 {
  grid-row: 1;
  grid-column: 1 / span 1;
  background-color:lightgreen;
}

#col2 {
  grid-row: 2;
  grid-column: 1 / span 2;
  background-color:lightcyan;
}

#col3 {
  grid-row: 3;
  grid-column: 1 / span 3;
  background-color:lightsalmon;
}


We get:



We can make our styles more readable, by specifying the layout spec in the containing element, and giving each line a name. This is done in square parenthesis ([,]). In the container element, we define the layout spec with the property grid-template-columns and grid-template-rows. Here, you would specify the width / height of the columns / rows.

(note: If you don't declare the columns and rows, as per the previous example, the grid is implicitly created based on your grid data - an explicit layout makes the grid more concise)

So, with that applied, when specifying the column - we can use the name rather than the column index, as per:

#gridContainer {
  display: grid;
  grid-template-columns: [start] 100px [col2] 100px [col3] 100px [end];
  grid-template-rows: [top] auto [middle] auto [end];
  
}

#col1 {
  grid-row: top;
  grid-column: start / col2;
  background-color:lightgreen;
}

#col2 {
  grid-row: middle;
  grid-column: start / col3;
  background-color:lightcyan;
}

#col3 {
  grid-row: end;
  grid-column: start / end;
  background-color:lightsalmon;
}


If you rows and columns follow the same spec for the whole page, you can use the repeat function which accepts two parameters - 1. How many times to repeat; and 2. the column/row spec.


e.g.: grid-template-columns: repeat(4, [col] 100px)

In this example, when referring to the column we would use the index, or the name "col index"

Well, I just wanted to give a brief overview of this new technologies. There are countless examples on http://gridbyexample.com/ that you can check out/try out.

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