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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

I noticed a lot of developers rave about flexbox, but not so much about grid.

It is my understanding that flexbox was intended for 1D layouts and grid was intended for 2D layouts. We've been using grid for the overall page layout and flex inside certain regions.

Is there something I am missing here, or are we finding that the hammer is pretty good at screws too?

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I would say the 1D/2D thing is a summary/rule of thumb. But grid can be useful for "1D" (linear) layouts too -- I feel like I've used it for something that was harder to do with flex even though it was linear, although I can't recall specifically. And flex can certainly be useful for some "2D" things depending on what you mean by that.

Grid is newer, and somewhat more complicated. Newer is probably the main reason it seems less popular than flex.

> Grid is newer

That's probably it. grid-template is a hell of a property too... Took me quite some time to figure it out.

CSS is grid is newer than Flexbox and has lower browser support, caniuse says 99.74% vs 96.95%. Overtime I imagine we'll see more utilization though

• Grid usage: https://caniuse.com/?search=css%20grid

• Flexbox usage: https://caniuse.com/?search=flexbox

I think its a reality that by and large most developers are coupled to some CSS / Component framework that they aren't writing all the CSS from scratch, and most of these frameworks only (currently, when I last surveyed, say ~3 months ago) provide Flex based CSS utilities. Until recently this was particularly true of Bootstrap and Zurb Foundation which were arguably the most popular of the CSS frameworks.

I also think its general knowledge. Took a really long time for everyone to use Flexbox too. Even as late as 2016/2017 I saw engineers still reach for things like unsemantic[0] (the 960 Grid successor) and other utilities like it if they were doing custom layouts.

[0]: https://unsemantic.com/

The hammer is pretty good at screws.

And CSS grid is only working on pentalobe screws, until subgrid is usable.

https://caniuse.com/?search=subgrid

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