Gridgarden: A cool game to learn CSS Grid | Hacker News Reader

Gridgarden: A cool game to learn CSS Grid

cssgridgarden.com

Outstanding. I learned the Flex layout by playing this simple game: https://flexboxfroggy.com/ (from the same author I believe). I wonder if there are examples of learning through playing a game that are as effective as these two.

css diner: https://flukeout.github.io/

This is awesome! Clearing some of the challenges without having to Google for the right selector feels good =) Congrats to whomever made it.

If you don't know how to contact the author, open an issue to say thank you. FOSS developers don't get enough love.

I've just done it. You're right.

The instructions are at the side (at least for me - Firefox mobile ;) )

So did I. Two awesome games.

http://www.flexboxdefense.com/ is great too. Very similar look and feel as flexboxfroggy.

I'm excited to come across these! Learning through gaming is great. This is how I was able to get as far as I have using VIM: https://vim-adventures.com/ I hope there are more out there!

Slime forest adventure has somewhat worked for me in the past as a flashcard game for Japanese.

https://lrnj.com/

Ive also been a big fan of these 2 games. Theres severel more coding games by the sam makers here.

https://codepip.com

CSS Grid still blows my mind. A syntax that actually makes sense for a visual styling language in CSS?

People like to make fun of Javascript but CSS doesn't get enough heat. It was absolutely awful and still is in many ways.

Even Flexbox is a convoluted mess with a strange naming scheme.

CSS Grids just makes so much more sense intuitively for what it's trying to do.

Was CSS even "meant" for layout initially?

To me Flexbox is still pretty natural. Names might be weird but there's not a great deal to know and it was the first CSS layout that actually IMO checked enough boxes not to be maddening.

CSS was originally intended as some kind of general-purpose document layout mechanism. It sucked at that at the beginning and ESPECIALLY sucked at web-application layout. Admittedly, part of the reason was because browser-makers would not play nice together and with standards.

Meanwhile, desktop application developers have ALWAYS enjoyed decent, predictable layout mechanisms. It is so frustrating that it took the web-based world 2 decades to get their shit together.

CSS-grid is built into the CSS standard itself and should have been there from the beginning. It took way too long, but I am glad it's here now.

I blame microsoft. I still can't believe they disbanded the IE team once IE6 had a stranglehold on the browser market.

You make it sound like CSS Grids is a replacement for flexbox. They each solve very different problems, and they complement each other.

I added a space between the two sentences to make it clearer I'm talking about CSS grid syntax doing a better job of what it's intended for, not doing what flexbox does.

I think the distinction and the small crossover is pretty clear to anyone who's used them.

Can you outline what problems each is trying to solve? I end up using each seemingly interchangeably quite often.

Flex: one dimension and handling an unknown amount of arbitrarily sized elements in any order

Grid: two dimensions and handling a known amount of reasonably sized elements

Imagine you take a piece of paper, draw 4 vertical and horizontal lines dividing the page into 16 cells. Now when you place an element in any of these cells with width: 100%, they'll take exactly the width of the grid cell. It can't grow beyond that.

You have a lot of flexibility in choosing the width and height of each cell, but they are rigid.

In case of Flexbox, we don't specify any fixed lines to which the elements will size. Instead, we say general rules saying elements can grow to as much size is available, or stay at the beginning of the row etc. The layout is determined to a large extend by the elements we place rather than on a fixed set of gridlines.

Use CSS Grid for a grid - like a spreadsheet with multiple rows and columns.

Use Flexbox for a single row or column.

So you might have a 10x10 grid and in the cell in row 3 column 5 you might want to have a bunch of images that are all in a row. Use Flexbox to layout those images.

Personally I can't be bothered and use grid for both. Why have a separate syntax for one dimension?

Here are 10 reasons why.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55064488/what-are-the-ar...

Thanks. Reconsidering my position. I think I'll still do

div {display: grid };

in my basic styles but be aware of some cases where flex may be more appropriate.

Flex:

1. For unknown number of items in one direction. (toolbar of buttons works better in flex)

2. Row-wrapping items. (ie, the unknown number of items need to flow with the screen, grid _stinks_ horrible at this)

Grid:

1. Specific forced number of columns but unknown number of rows (the control is the ultimate, flexbox still does some loosey-goosey stuff where grid stays put). Also, when I know exactly what I want and where it will go and there is no ambiguity about it, grid is perfect. Rows are implicit (ie, any number of rows) This makes clean form building a dream...

2. Specific layout with areas. Think header, columns, footer all part of a unified design. Way, easier in grid than in flexbox.

Grid has grid-gap, which is vital for making some layouts easy. Flex only has grid-gap in Firefox, so you are stuck with flippin margins for item spacing in flexbox still, yuck.

To add onto point 2, areas are really powerful, because it makes changing layout based on screen width really easy.

So is it just me or is the syntax for css grid a bit clunky? I'm talking about specifying ranges using "1 / 4" to mean 1-3 inclusive, or having to separately specify grid-template-rows and grid-template-columns each time. It makes it both hard to learn in the first place, but also hard to remember for casual users (people who use it once a month or so for a new design).

Tables don't have the same issue -- once you learn the syntax for tables, you never forget. And even bootstrap is a bit more memorable. But css grid always requires a few trips to stack overflow.

Everything else about it is fantastic, but I wish they thought more about intermittent users.

While I agree with it not being as suitable for intermittent users as table, it is also much more powerful. And, you need not separately specify rows and columns.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/grid-templa...

And, if you find yourself repeating yourself, you can use variables!

I think it can be simple if you try to only solve a few things with grid.

When I first learned grid, I could only figure out one or two things. Then I got ok with a few things, then I went crazy and made a magic framework.

Now, I only use primarily these:

  display:grid;
  grid-gap: [value];
  grid-template-columns: 1fr max-content, etc...;

That is 90% of my use case for grid. For entire page layouts, I would use grid-area so I can place stuff where I want and move it around on mobile. Grid rows are implicit with the above code, so I so I have a mini-framework with utility classes for a few different column scenarios. (3 columns, column with compressed/flexible combinations for things like forms, etc...)

I personally dislike it. Sure, its powerful and is maybe an improvement over what we had before, but maaaan its so complex compared to desktop UI libraries I've used, especially QML with columns, rows, grids and anchors.

Simple example, in the Grid Garden, on Level 3: grid-column-start is the grid cell it starts on, but grid-column-end is the cell after the one it ends on (half-open range), but on Level 4 when start is 5 and end is 2 its the opposite: the end column is included but the start one is not. Also, why would you do it in reverse like this even? And in Level 6, why -3 and not -2?

Honestly, I'm more confused now than I was before. At least placing the top-left corner and using span makes sense to me. I guess its better than making grids in other ways, but why did it have to be so weird?

I believe start and end are numbered according to the lines between cells, not the cells themselves

I work in government which is pretty modern but there are users who still use Ie 11.

It looks like IE11 doesn't have full support for flex box or css garden..is that correct?

Flexbox: "Partial support is due to large number of bugs present"

https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox

Grid: "Partial support in IE refers to supporting an older version of the specification"

https://caniuse.com/#search=grid

IIRC IE implemented Grid first but their spec had enough problems that the standard isn't much like it.

Im not a UI dev but for my basic stuff I stuck with bootstrap since it supports every browser for positioning.

bootstrap 5 is dropping IE support: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/pull/23586

I use Suzy grids 2 for ie and everything above and it works great.

Microsoft doesn't consider IE a browser anymore, they call it a "compatibility solution"[0][1]. If a site looks bad in IE, I think that is ok these days. (functional but ugly, is there an industry phrase to encapsulate this idea?) IE 11 was released 5 year ago...

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-security-chief-ie-is...

[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-IT-Pro-Blog/T...

Graceful degradation.

Thank you. I guess I always considered that a phrase regarding features where a browser doesn't have a feature yet, but will in the future. But I guess it works well for the other direction as well.

(ie, a browser that will never have any new features)

That's progressive enhancement.

Progressive Enhancement: Starting from some baseline, ideally static content, and building in features that newer, usually visual browsers can support

Graceful degradation: What happens if things don't work perfectly, or some browser doesn't support a feature, or network connectivity is shit so your js file doesn't load.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

It's iffy, but IE was the first to support any grid spec. I'd build a float based layout and progressively enhance newer layout methods

I am still amazed CSS Grid named areas are not used more often.

To me the named areas are the first time that CSS layout makes sense and I first did layouts in tables in the late 90s.

Yes! Named areas are the best! The thing I can never decide is whether to use descriptive names or stick to single letter (since single letter helps visually clarify the intended layout)

Since CSS isn't really space-sensitive, you could just pad unevenly matched names with spaces, and then layout should be reasonably clear in any standard monospaced text editor.

I don’t know why that didn’t occur to me. Thanks.

Tried this and their froggy game a few months ago. I thought it was cool, but I felt it didn't translate well into the real-world. I still have significant issues figuring out how to do layouts in CSS and I still hate trying to do so.

This is completely normal. Flexible layouts in any UI system are difficult. I was surprised that the authors of all the popular CSS books and courses usually skip or barely cover that part. Apparently they know it's a topic difficult to explain with short snippets of CSS and HTML. Too many moving parts, especially with dynamic content. In the end, you learn by doing it.

I did a pretty popular comprehensive video tutorial on CSS grid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPFDLHNm5KQ

Best 40 minutes you'll spend if you want to learn CSS Grid! :) First 5 mins are a bit of history, with grid starting at the 5 min. mark.

Great work with the tutorial. One question though, aren't flexbox and grid supposed to be complementary systems? The history part seems to suggest that css grid is the next step in the evolution, or an improvement over flex.

I learned flexbox since I thought... well you were supposed to. Should I have been using grid all along?

This is great! I know ZERO about CSS grid, but this taught me something and very straightforwardly.

This is great. There is also Flexbox Froggy if anyone is interested: https://codepip.com/games/flexbox-froggy/

Great game, but does grid display use 1-based numbering?

I created a CSS Grid course on Udemy at https://www.udemy.com/css-grid-with-react/. My goal was to use it to build an Instagram web app clone. What I learned was that a lot of the features are really cool to play with but many lack practical use cases, its strong suit being its ability to go in both row and column directions. However despite trying I couldn't think of any use-case for configuring rows (going vertically). I found the grid-template-columns to be most useful, but the grid-area feels fairly gimmicky, as if you were building a quilt. Perhaps for a dashboard application. Overall, I just use flexbox now, even though CSS Grid has a cleaner API.

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