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Comment by amarraja | Hacker News Reader

Things have changed since I was doing frontend dev (<table>), and I want to brush up on modern CSS techniques. Could someone answer the following for me?

1. Is flexbox the way to go (i.e. the new standard?)

2. Is there a css primer to help with all this? I tried centering a div with CSS once, it didn't end well!

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it looks like it'll become the next standard yes. but support isn't there yet.

http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox

http://howtocenterincss.com/

93.99% is more than "support isn't there yet", in my opinion. Enough for many projects at least. Obviously if you develop sites with a big IE8/9 audience you should think twice.

1) Yes. 2) This is a pretty nice short intro http://flexboxin5.com or for a fuller treatment check MDN, as for any other web technology. There are a bunch of other sources linked from this discussion thread if you scroll down a bit.

Thanks! So it will be enough to learn just flexbox without any "legacy" css? (Assume I won't be maintaining / porting any old code)

Erm.. flexbox is just one part of CSS, useful for a particular subset of layout tasks. CSS has many other parts you need to learn if you want to style web pages.

Aah I see. You can tell my frontend knowledge is dire! I'll start on the basics first

I think everything related to layout can be made with flexbox (e.g. you can avoid doing ugly tricks with tables, blocks, floats, calc(), calculating percentages, etc), but you still need the usual style for text, size of images, borders, backgrounds...

Essentially, it avoids the "I FSCKING HATE CSS" parts.

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