Flexbox today is very, very real. After many years of development, the specification has become much more stable, making it easier to achieve those CSS layout dreams. In this article, Dennis Gaebel Jr will discuss layout patterns well suited to flexbox, using the interface from the Tracks application, which also takes advantage of atomic design principles. He’ll share how flexbox proved useful and note the pitfalls of pairing it with particular layout patterns, and also look at those patterns that caused concern, provide suggestions for fallbacks and share additional tactics to start using this CSS property immediately.
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Did you ever take a walk through the entire Unicode table? It’s the history of our civilization expressed in typography. It might be organized in an arbitrary fashion and not explained well, but it’s all here: languages, cultures, concepts. Spaces are here, too. There’s the one with an agent good enough to have gotten it the biggest key on everyone’s keyboard, but there are many more: the very narrow hair and thin spaces, the super-wide en and em spaces, and a few others in between. Let’s find out what other space characters there are, what their heritage is, and how they can be useful today.
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Back in spring 2013, Smashing Magazine sported a <select> menu as its mobile navigation. It wasn’t considered an anti-pattern back then and Marco Hengstenberg still thinks it’s a viable solution to the complex problem of how to build accessible and functional cross-device navigation. Brad Frost wrote a few words about the pros and cons of this pattern on his blog and Marco couldn’t agree more. In this article, Marco will explain how he helped rebuild the mobile navigation in order to enhance the experience for the readers of Smashing Magazine.
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The future of web layout is bright, thanks to flexbox. The CSS layout mechanism lets us arrange elements in a truly web-like way. Some elements can be fixed, while others scroll. The order in which they appear can be independent of the source order. And everything can fit a range of screen sizes. Yep, it’s a great time to jump into flexbox if you haven’t done so yet. But flexbox has a dizzying array of features, and in this article, Ben Gremillion will take a look at how you could create a basic Gmail-like, flexbox-based interface. If you haven’t explored or fully understood flexbox yet, this piece will revisit and explain a few things that might be confusing at first.
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Most of the time, we develop websites without understanding what the browser is actually doing under the hood. How exactly does the browser render our web pages from the HTML, CSS and JavaScript that we create? Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool can be very helpful when trying to profile a web page and find areas for improvement. You simply enter the URL of the page that you want to test, and the tool provides you with a list of performance suggestions. Fortunately, the solution to this problem is simpler than it seems! The answer lies in the way that the CSS and JavaScript are loaded in your web page.
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CSS quantity queries follow the concept of changing the styles based on a condition: the condition within a quantity query being the number of sibling elements. An example would be navigation where items are 25% wide when four items are available; yet when there are five items available, the width of the navigation items changes to 20%. This is a common problem with dynamic site frameworks like WordPress or Ghost. Can you avoid too many media queries and JavaScript workarounds? Yes, you can. This is where quantity queries are best used. By being creative with CSS selectors, we can count the number of sibling items and apply styles if they meet the conditions. Using these queries, we can future-proof our designs and projects, and allow them to scale gracefully.
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Implementations usually involved either using an external image editor to create multiple images for multiple values of the pie chart, or large JavaScript frameworks designed for much more complex charts. Although the feat is not as impossible as it once was, there’s still no simple one-liner for it. However, in this article, Lea Verou will show you that there are many better, more maintainable ways to achieve it today.
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Quantity queries and quantity ordering are advanced concepts and might be scary for beginners. However, as we move presentational styling away from programming languages and into CSS, we should use these tools more and more. Even as many members of our industry explore content queries, we can now use quantity queries to modify the order of content simply by counting. If you had to create a table of items, you might assume that JavaScript would be the best solution — just loop over the items, and if there are more than three, update the styling. But what if I told you could do it with CSS alone?
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There are various ways to approach responsive typography and consistent vertical rhythm, and they are not limited to my suggestion. However, Jonathan Suh finds that this works for him more times than not. Managing consistent, typographic rhythm isn’t easy, but when the type is responsive, things get even more difficult. Fortunately, Sass maps make responsive typography much more manageable. This is where Sass maps and loops are powerful: They’ve helped him manage z-index values, colors and, as you’ll see in this article, font sizes.
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In Pieces is an interactive exhibition of 30 of the world’s most endangered species. The experience is an informational reminder of the beauty we are in danger of losing every day, but it’s also a showcase of evolutionary distinction. Users are told the stories and struggles of these unique lifeforms, as well as invited to dive into numerical data, download wallpapers and even obtain a poster featuring the entire collection. In this article, Bryan James explores the inspiration for the project and aspects of how different parts were built, and he’ll dive into how you can use this greatly underrated line of CSS for your own projects.
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