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CSS

Posted by Kristina Nelson
Kristina Nelson
4,196 Points

Layout - Grid..Floats...Flex box...Position??? Whoa.

Hi,

So I've been trying to practice laying out a web page. And I'm very confused. What is the easiest/most effective means to layout a website?

Do I use the float property and position property? Should I skip that and opt for the flex box model for responsive design? Am I suppose to use grids?

It seems there are all these factors to layout - and I'm not sure if I'm suppose to somehow use all of them?

Should I not use flex box because of lack of browser support?
And if I do use it with the prefixes, will browsers accept it?

Thank in advance,

Kristina

2 Answers

Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points
Kevin Korte
Kevin Korte
28,148 Points

Today, I'm still using grids and floats.Grids are a tool to help you align elements on a page, floats are what is mostly used today to position elements on a page. Two different, but simple purposes.

I'm not using Flexbox today, but am anxsiouly waiting for it to have better support. I would suggest you keep your eye on this: http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox and when you feel comfortable with the support of flexbox, start using it.

You can see what flexbox can do on this site: http://philipwalton.github.io/solved-by-flexbox/ just make sure you are using a browser that supports flexbox.

You can also see what the page looks like in a non-flexbox browser, like Firefox.

Grids are floats work together to provide today's web page layouts, and flexbox appears to be a proper solution to layouts, and is almost here as far a support goes.

James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points
James Barnett
James Barnett
39,199 Points

Do I use the float property and position property? Should I skip that and opt for the flex box model for responsive design? Am I suppose to use grids?

Margin, padding & floating is the primary method. In fact "grids" are just an advanced applied method of floating. By definition a responsive website is fluid grids + flexible images + media queries so if you want to make a responsive website you have to start with a fluid grid.

Building a site using flex box is a bit like building on shifting sand, not currently recommended for production use.