I want to present dynamically generated (PHP, XML) questionnaires to the user in the browser like this:
requirements:
1. The left column will will always be a number, the middle and the right column may swap position in some questionnaires.
2. There will be questionnaires with 200 items or so over multiple pages.
3. The width of the container (rounded corners) is fixed at 800px at this time, BUT
4. it has to be flexible / fluid in the near future for being displayed on mobile devices like iPad and iPhone
what I've tried
I experimented both with a <table> based and a <div> based layout:
The <table> was clean and simple, but with lots of overhead and not very flexible, e.g. if I swapped middle and right column for item #2 only...
The <div> based layout was sleeker, I let the containers float, but have to set the divs to a fixed width in order to get them align in columns. In a fluid design, I do not know the widths in advance, which will be a mess then...
questions to the pros:
1. <table> or <div>, regarding my requirements above, what would you prefer?
2. is there some magic tool to make this nice and easy?
3. would you rather serve the raw data and let a client-side script (jQuery) do the positioning instead?
Here's a code example: http://codepen.io/anon/pen/inmwD
Either use a wrapping div or a list element
<div class="parent">
<div class="row">
<div class="col1">1</div>
<div class="col2">Content</div>
<div class="col3"><input type="radio"/></div>
</div>
</div>
In my opinion <table> is for tables <div> is for layout.
Yes there are some style templates usually named grid system or css grid take a look at this stack : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/76996/what-is-the-best-css-grid-framework
I wont arrange elements around with JavaScript unless it can't be done with css or is a special requirement from the marketing guys. The con about this is that you increase the page render time.
Take a look at this fiddle made with a custom 960 grid system that have 6 columns with the width 150px
Fixed width: http://jsfiddle.net/UjXPR/
Fluid width: http://jsfiddle.net/UjXPR/1/
960 gs customizer: http://grids.heroku.com/
Checkout bootstrap grid system
1. <table> or <div>, regarding my requirements above, what would you prefer?
div is specially used for layout of the page and table is specially used for placing tabular data. so in your condition I would choose the table layout for the questionnaire.
2. is there some magic tool to make this nice and easy?
First dream to design how should this row data look then only accomplish for the site.
3. would you rather serve the raw data and let a client-side script (jQuery) do the positioning instead?
This is not good idea but if the clients need so you could do that.
And one more thing, you are not asking for your problem with SO but asking what we like, this is not good practice for SO users.
Related
i have set WordPress-site with a gutenberg block in the theme twenty-twenty: i did it according to Mike Haydons manual see: https://www.intelliwolf.com/how-to-make-a-four-column-layout-in-gutenberg/ "How To Make A multi Column Layout In Gutenberg"
Mike states:
To make a x column layout in the WordPress Gutenberg editor, select
the x column layout, Start by choosing the "Columns" block. Assuming
you want four equal columns, choose the three equal columns variation.
It's the 66 / 33 one.
the question: how to set the width of the column!? Should i do this via Appearance/Simple Css?! Some of my friends told me that this would be possible: see the image with the two column layout: 66,6 / 33,3 %
the column settings are quite worse - see the site: https://www.job-starter.com - which is truely beta-beta.
what makes me wonder is; why do i have
a. such a big border
b. see the margin that i have here
c. note that i have added a wp-job-manager-plugin with some demo job-listings
all looks pretty awful and i wonder how to get a better layout. all the elements are centered in a very high grade - nothing is arranged - and i have a awesome big margin
how to solve this in the theme twenty-twenty (TT)
all looks pretty awful and i wonder how to get a better layout. all the elements are centered in a very high grade - nothing is arranged - and i have a awesome big margin
I don't see the border that you are talking about but I can explain about the weird width.
First of all, it is not a margin actually but a limited width.
Looking at the elements of the page, we can notice that they have this style:
.entry-content > :not(.alignwide):not(.alignfull):not(.alignleft):not(.alignright):not(.is-style-wide) {
max-width: 58rem;
width: calc(100% - 4rem);
}
And searching the source code of the theme, you can find that this style is hardcoded.
I can recommend you a couple of solutions:
Changing a page template to have an adequate container width ( the wide one is called Full Width Template, please check the screenshot
Overriding the style with your own sizing ( but remember that selectors here are too heavy like in the CSS snippet above. You can try using the same snippet with different sizes that will fit your expectactions.
You can create your own template using a child theme
My HTML code is organized in this way:
<div class="Container">
<div class="Card"></div>
<div class="Card"></div>
<div class="Card"></div>
<div class="Card"></div>
<div class="Card"></div>
</div>
And my CSS is organized as such:
.Container
lost-utility clearfix
.Card:first-child
lost-waffle 1 1 15px
.Card:nth-child(n+2)
lost-waffle 1/2 2 15px
The result looks like the following:
My issue is that I am trying to get the first div to span 100% of the width, the way it shows in the image, and the rest of the divs to display 1/2 the width. I do not know how to get that second div to the left instead of to the right, and then the third div to the right and up, etc... Basically all the divs after the first div needs to be shifted by 1. I haven't been able to figure this out. Any help would be appreciated.
The issue here is caused by the cycle that LostGrid. Because LostGrid uses :nth-child as the means to select which elements to style, the top "Card" is the first in the cycle, and then the second "Card" takes the second place...when in your layout the second card should start the cycle instead of being second.
There are three options I came up with quickly to solve this.
Option 1
Use LostGrid and have containing divs around the different cards.
Option 2 Not use LostGrid but instead use the math it provides and create the layout in vanilla css.
Here's a CodePen with the three options: http://codepen.io/peterramsing/pen/YWrrjv
I'd lean towards Option 2 as LostWaffle is designed for equal card sizes.
Option 3? I included a third option. It works but it has some excess css that is outputted. But it's an idea.
I haven't run into an issue like this with LostGrid yet as I either use Vanilla css for this or would use containing divs. LostGrid is an amazing tool to use for creating Grids and it's built to help enhance the existing means that css has for creating grids. There are various times when LostGrid isn't the tool to use and with PostCSS it's great because it doesn't add bloat if you only use it a handful of times.
This might, however, be a possible feature add for LostGrid to have a bit more control over the cycle. I'll think on it a bit more.
Hopefully that helps and be sure to let me know if you think that cycle should have some additional customizations for it in later releases.
[Note: for those who may be confusing this question with "why not use tables for HTML layout", I am not asking that question. The question I'm asking is why is a grid layout fundamentally different from a table layout.]
I'm researching CSS libraries (in particular Bootstrap) for a project. I am a programmer rather than a web designer and I feel I could benefit from a library that encapsulates good design.
We all know that it's bad practice to use HTML tables to accomplish basic site layout because it mixes presentation with content. One of the benefits provided by CSS libraries like Bootstrap is that they offer the ability to create "grid" layouts without using tables. I'm having a little trouble, however, understanding how their grid layouts differ in any meaningful way from the equivalent table layout.
In other words, what is the fundamental difference between these two examples of HTML? Am I wrong in thinking that the grid layout is simply a table with another name?
<div class="row">
<div class="span16"></div>
</div>
<div class="row">
<div class="span4"></div>
<div class="span4"></div>
<div class="span4"></div>
<div class="span4"></div>
</div>
and
<table>
<tr>
<td colspan=4></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
The difference is that the first example is semantically marked up, assuming the data being marked up is not actually tabular. <table> should only be used for tabular data, not for any data which happens to be displayed in a layout similar to a table.
It is correct though that using CSS packages like Bootstrap, which require you to assign classes to HTML elements which are not semantic but presentational, reduces the separation of content and presentation, making the difference somewhat moot. You should be assigning semantically meaningful classes to your elements and use lesscss mixins (or similar technology) to assign presentational behavior defined in the CSS framework to these classes, instead of assigning the presentational classes to the elements directly.
Say:
<div class="products">
<div class="product"></div>
</div>
.products {
.row;
}
.products > .product {
.span16;
}
Note that I say should. In practice this is not necessarily always the more workable option, but it should be the theoretical goal.
I believe that CBroe comment is the best option, so I chose to clarify it.
Avoid div's. A div should be your last resort, not your first option. Instead, try to use Bootstrap classes on the actual elements. For instance:
<form class="container">
<fieldset class="row">
<label class="span4" for"search">Type your search</label>
<input class="span6" type="text" id="search" />
</fieldset>
</form>
It is a shame to use fieldset to contain a single field, but it is semantically best than using a div for the same thing. The HTML5 standard defines many new container elements, such as article, section, header, footer and many more. In some cases you will have to use div's, but if you minimize it's use then your code will be way more semantic.
The fundamental difference is that you can "reflow" the layout with Bootstrap for different display sizes simply using media queries without needing to change your markup. For example, I can decide that on desktops, I want your 4 divs to be on same row because user has high resolution wide display but on phones I want 2 dives on one row and next divs on next rows. So this way I can adapt my column count in each row using media queries. If you use hard coded HTML tables then it is very difficult to do this.
Having said that, I don't really like bootstrap implementation for the following reasons:
It has breakpoints hard coded in pixels. This means, as phones and tables advance in display resolution, your website may start showing unexpected layouts on those devices. Pixel count is poor proxy for display size.
It limits maximum used display area to 1170px which is again a bummer for users with nice wide displays they can actually use to see more content in your app.
Bootstrap's layout is not source independent, i.e., you can't change column order that is set in HTML. This is however more of a pedantic point.
The default layout is for very small resolution and higher resolution layouts trigger only when media queries fire, which IMO, is a poor choice considering phones will continue to have better resolution and sooner than later your website would have default layout set for outdated mobile devices.
Bootstrap layouts are not truly "worry free" in the sense that you have to read their fine print to see all the bugs and browsers they didn't see worthy of supporting but which you may care about. If you are targeting users in South Korea or China, you would be in for surprise, for example.
So, not everything is gold in bootstrap and their approach is not necessarily always the best possible (as an aside, one other thing I despise in bootstrap is their obsession with so called "jumbotrones" - those real estate wasting inconvenient in-your-face headers - which I hope community doesn't start taking as "new standard"). Personally I use CSS table layout (display:table) these days which has similar benefits as bootstrap without hardcoding <table> in my markup. I can still use media queries to rearrange rows depending on portrait or landscape orientation, for example. However the most important benefit is that my layouts are truly pixel or even percentage independent. For example, in 3 column layout, I let content to decide how much space first and last columns should take. There is no pixel or even percentage width. The center column grabs up all the remaining space (which is good thing for my app, but it may not be for others). In addition, I use ems in media query break points which bootstrap surprisingly doesn't.
I use the Bootstrap grid for page layout, tables for tabular data.
I think of the grid in Bootstrap, not as a grid in the developer sense, like a gridview control, but more in the design page-layout sense - as a grid to contain the page contents. And even though the Bootstrap grid could be also used to create a conventional grid containing tabular data, as deceze pointed out, this kind of grid is better suited for HTML tables - which are still acceptable to use in this scenario.
if you just use tables i think you will miss out on alot of flexibility in re-sizing your document for mobile/tablets without having to make a separate page for each device. once your table structure is defined all you can really do is zoom in and out.
While there's not necessarily much semantic difference between the two sets of markup (since the classes used by Bootstrap's grid system are indeed purely presentational), one very important distinction is that the grid system is much more flexible.
It would be very difficult, for example, to make your table-based layout respond to different screen sizes. There's no way to tell the browser to display one td element below another td in the same row. Whereas with the div example, that's easy to do, and the same markup can be presented in different ways even when the classes are "presentational" in the sense that they define the relative proportions and positioning of the elements on the page.
If I may, I'd like to summarize what I gathered from the other comments and the link explosion I experienced from this page:
The problem with using tables isn't the grid layout, it is the attempt to express it with HTML instead of CSS.
Bootstrap allows grid layouts through (mostly) pure CSS, which is why it is OK. The 'mostly' part comes because your HTML will still be contaminated by your layout data, but more subtly:
<nav class="span4"> ... </nav>
<article class="span8"> ... </article>
This is surely significantly more semantic and maintainable than the old tabular designs, but the 'span4' and 'span8' are still display-data embedded into our HTML. However, since design can never be truly be decoupled from our data (e.g., nested divs), this is a reasonable price to pay.
That being said, even this coupling can be broken, if you use some more modern CSS features provided by a pre-processed language such as LESS. The same example:
<nav id="secondary-nav"> ... </nav>
<article id="main-content"> ... </article>
Coupled with the following LESS:
#secondary-nav{
.span4;
// More styling (padding, etc) if needed
}
#main-content{
.span8;
}
This creates fully decoupled HTML and Stylesheet, which is ideal, because the HTML is cleaner and more readable, and redesigns can be made with less HTML modification. However this only works if you use LESS or some other CSS pre-processor, because CSS currently does not support mixins (AFAIK).
We already use LESS in my workplace, so I know I'll be pushing towards using this type of solution. I'm a very strong believer in semantic HTML and data-design decoupling. :)
Basically DIVs are DIVs & Table elements are simply table elements. The problem with tables is often just keeping track of all of the columns & the rows because it is ultimately a strict data construct. DIVs are far more flexible & forgiving.
For example, if you wanted to to take the four DIVs with the class that equals "span4" and just change them to a 2 column width, all you would need to do is adjust a wee bit of CSS for the outer class "row" and maybe the class "span4". In fact when doing DIVs like this I would avoid calling individual DIVs "span4" or some other number.
My approach would be to create a parent wrapper DIV that is called "rowspan" and the inner DIVs would have some generic ID like maybe "cell".
<div class="rowspan">
<div class="cell"></div>
<div class="cell"></div>
<div class="cell"></div>
<div class="cell"></div>
</div>
Each "cell" class could have a width of 100 pixels for example, and then the parent "rowspan" could be 400 pixels. That would equate to 4 columns in a row. Want to make it 2 columns? No problem! Just change "rowspan" to be 200 pixels wide. At this point it is all in CSS so it's easy to do without rejiggering page structure in the DOM.
But with tables? Not easy. You would have to basically re-render the table with </tr><tr> tags to create new rows.
Version with table, tr, td depends on browser algorithms - wrapping, dynamic width, margins, centering etc.
Version with div can be more easily tuned by css and scripts.
I want to get 4 columns, with the text floating in all of them. I don't want to make 4 separate divs, because when the first column if full of text, the text should continue in the next column.
I also want to set the width of each column and the padding between. Additionally, the height should be flexible, depending on how much text there is.
Do you have any ideas?
This is very difficult to achieve, and is not how HTML is designed. The recommend approach would be to render all the text in a single HTML element (div or p, etc) and in the browser, dynamically alter the content and markup with respect to a pre-determined "preferred height" and number of columns. You can use the height() methods of jQuery to assist you in this.
Here is a script with some of the groundwork.
An article explaining future support available in CSS3.
This article (11 Classic CSS Techniques Mad Simple With CSS3) shows how to do this using Mozilla- and WebKit-specific properties. Columns like these are item number 9 on the list.
For IE you'll need to wait for CSS3 support or use a script, such as the Columnize jQuery plugin mentioned in the article.
I've seen quite a few answers on this site which advocate using tables for a design because it can't be done using CSS and Divs... when in actual fact it can be done with a bit of ingenuity.
What are examples of things that genuinely can't be done?
The only one I've ever come across is vertically aligning a box within another box.
*edit: I suppose I'm mostly interested in unachievable layouts using CSS2
Vertical alignment of blocks or text.
Having elastic containers that stretch to the width of their content.
Having several "rows" with the same structure where "cells" are synchronized in width throughout all rows.
Having several "columns" synchronize their height (up to the length of the longest text block).
These are quite basic designer needs that appear in even basic design concepts.
Cells/columns issues can possibly be solved with CSS if you take IE8 into account, but it will be many years until its wide spread (even IE7 in 2-3 years hasn't reached the desired market share).
As for "ingenuity", it is not that good thing in software development. Tricks that your colleagues and you yourself after a couple of months will not be able to understand usually build up that code base that everyone either is scared to touch or determined to refactor/rewrite completely.
Remember the KISS principle. The simpliest way you do this, the more reliably it will work.
The answer to this question depends on a number of things:
How backwards compatible do you need to be? Including IE6 will decrease the capacity of pure CSS; and
How much of your site is fixed-width and/or fixed-height. There are certain things in CSS that become hard if not impossible in variable width and/or height situations.
Side-by-side content is a problem for CSS. You can use floats for this but if the sum of widths exceeds the width of the container, the tail end floats will fall down below. Tables are more capable in this regard as they will squeeze columns where possible to make things fit and cells will never be split onto new rows.
Vertical centering you mentioned. Its trivial with tables and hard or impossible (depending on compatibility and fixed or variable heights of the container and the item) in pure CSS.
You may also be referring to hover content. IE6 only supports the :hover pseudo element on anchors. Javascript is required for that browser for :hover-like behaviour.
Basically if what you need to do can be done fairly trivially with pure CSS then do it. If not, don't feel bad if you have to use tables despite all the anti-table fanatics (and they are fanatics) jumping up and down in horror.
If you want a relatively simple exmaple of this check out Can you do this HTML layout without using tables?. This is a conceptually simple layout problem that is trivial with tables and noone has yet posted a solution meeting the requirements with pure CSS.
"... when in actual fact it can be done
with a bit of ingenuity."
How about 'avoiding the need for ingenuity' as a thing that's hard to do in CSS.
;)
tables should be used for tabular data! We should always try to use the correct HTML for the given content in which to markup. So not just div's (span, ul, li, dl, strong, em ... etc) This ensures that the content is not just looking right but is right (for SEO and accesibile reasons)
By not using tables it allows us to transform the content from one look and feel to the next without having to change the HTML, see Zen Garden
For now though with current browsers CSS table like layouts can be done but are tricky. there are techniques to get round many of the issues, weather they are done though global wrappers with background images, or positioning fixes... where both articles also refer to using Javascript to progressively enhance a page to get those additional classes you may require.
or of course you could use some XSL as a middle ware to help do formating if processing from a CMS.
Alternate row colors in a table without manually (or with the aid of a script) assigning alternate styles to each row.
Determine one element's position relative to another. For example you can't use CSS to determine which position one box is in a bunch of floated boxes using the same class. Would be nice to for example know if one box is the first box floated, or the second, or the last.
Handle widows. A widow is a word that dangles off the end of a paragraph, that is a single word starts the last line on a paragraph. It's a big nono on print design, but in the world of web it's hard to control.
Floating elements in multiple columns, where text in each cell can expand the height of the element, but the entire row below must be pushed down if this happens.
--- --- ---
|AAA| |BBB| |CCC|
--- --- ---
--- --- ---
|AAA| |BBB| |CCC|
| | |BBB| | |
--- --- ---
--- --- ---
|AAA| |BBB| |CCC|
--- --- ---
An image cannot placed in exact center of a cell with align attribute.It can be done with some brute force .
Sounds obvious but you can't change content with CSS, it can only be used for styling.
Rory, I think you're absolutely right. Vertical alignment can be done with line-height, and creating lay-outs in CSS really isn't that hard. In fact, it's far more flexible when using absolute/relative positioning and floats.
People still using tables for design should really brush up with the current standards.
Going on topic, with CSS3 coming up it's hard to think of stuff CSS can't do. Image manipulation, content manipulation, advanced selectors, it's all going to be possible. But if I had to name one thing, it's that with CSS you can't (and won't) be able to rotate elements.
I was unable to use a transparency to create a variable-height text area across all pages. I believe it's impossible. I ultimately just wrote a quick javascript function to reset the height after the page load, to get the layout to work. See http://peterchristopher.com to see what I mean by transparency for the text area.
There is absolutely nothing tables can do that CSS can't.
There seems to be a common misconception that HTML & CSS should be easy. It isn't. If you find yourself wanting to use tables then its your CSS skills that need improving not the technology (although the technology does obviously have plenty of holes that could do with improving).