What are best practices to make layout scalable? [closed] - html

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What is technical difference between Fluid vs liquid vs elastic vs Flexible css layouts?
Are these all same or different technically?
Is fluid layout better for both mobiles and computer user?
I think there are only two properties to make fluid layout "em" and "%".
And we already use "em" for font even in fixed width layouts. What are other things we need to do to make site flexible? Which part should be flexible and which would be better as fixed? Or we should make whole thing flexible?

I suggest you to read some articles about this subject. Smashing magazine has a great post about it, to see which one is right for you. They have some definitions about these layouts and I believe they are very accurate:
Fixed:
A fixed website layout has a wrapper
that is a fixed width, and the
components inside it have either
percentage widths or fixed widths. The
important thing is that the container
(wrapper) element is set to not move.
No matter what screen resolution the
visitor has, he or she will see the
same width as other visitors.
Fluid:
In a fluid website layout, also
referred to as a liquid layout, the
majority of the components inside have
percentage widths, and thus adjust to
the user’s screen resolution.
Elastic:
There is a third option when working
with Web page layouts. An elastic
design is sometimes preferred by
designers because it mixes the two
other main layout types. It works by
sizing all elements with em’s. The
quote below explains exactly what an
em is and why it can be beneficial.
The pros and cons in the article are very concise too, with examples and further researching.
If you choose to use "fluidic" layouts, read their article about the subject as well.

They are all pretty much the same. If you want to get really picky, I guess you could say that elastic has a maximum width, whereas fluid might continue to increase in width as long as the window is widened. But generally, they are interchangeble.

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Website messes up when changing the size of the browser [closed]

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I have a problem whenever the website changes its size in any way, whether it be the size of the browser or if inspecting the code in the web browser, any change to the size of the page makes it look really really bad. I only started learning to code last week and I picked up the challenge "social proof section" on frontendmentor.io to practice my HTML and CSS. If anyone could take a look at it and tell me what is causing it I would be very grateful! also, its quite embarrassing posting this here as I'm a total nooby and with having only started learning a week ago, my code is obviously very very bad
website link: https://blakebutlin95.github.io/Social-Proof-Section-Challenge/
Github link: https://github.com/BlakeButlin95/Social-Proof-Section-Challenge/tree/master/css
also sorry about one of the empty codes in the css file, I didnt even realise it existed until a minute ago
You are using absolute positioning ,it is positioned absolutely with reference to the closest parent that has a position relative value , If there are no parent elements that has a relative position, then the absolutely positioned element will take its reference from the browser window.
The problem isn't the resizing of the page. The problem is that you have used absolute sizes. That means when I open the page it looks even worse because I have a different screen size. You have to create different sections and the implement the objects in there.
This is how it would look on a smaller pc.
Here a sketch how to build it properly.
Try to use for horizontal sizing only % and for vertical sizing px.
Use for the boxes the <div> tag.
Sometimes you have to set it to display: inline-block; so that multiple div's will fit on one line.
It is also important to not set a height because it depends always on the device how much space the text will need. Try to use instead more padding.
Update:
A more modern approach would be with flex-box or grid.
It is cause you're using the absolute sizes, this will give problems for different screen sizes. Try looking up flex box and apply it here.

What are the downsides of using relative position in CSS? [closed]

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I am not very good at CSS, especially when it comes to positioning things on the screen. Is it fine if I eyeball everything and use
position: relative;
with a number of pixels for many of the elements on the page? Is it considered sloppy/unprofessional?
It's totally okay and also it will render fast - possibly even faster than a normal flow-based content. Text flows require the browser to calculate literally every character's position and size and only then are they sure about anything that comes after. It's fairly obvious.
Using absolute or fixed positioning is a lot easier; it's mostly about pixels, no need to pre-render other elements. Relative positioning is a bit trickier, it can depend on earlier contents; on the other hand, this gives it's power.
So no, it's not a sin to use HTML/CSS this way. Check dev console for rendering performance and see how it's different when you're trying. But it should be fast, convenient and supported everywhere.
You can use different kind of scale types like fr, em, vh or % instead of px, it will more helpful when you chancing the size of the browser or using in mobile apps. You should use px in some part, too. Also, you can use position with other values like absolute, fixed etc.
The answer depends on a few factors, but styling the whole website using specifically positioned elements would be considered sloppy.
The reason for this is, that any new content could easily wreck your layout, not to mention having to specifically position everything again for each screen size you wish to support.
You would be much better off using a Flexbox layout (display: flex), or maybe a Grid (display: grid), as these were designed to solve the specific layout issues you might run into.
Even if you feel uncomfortable using CSS, it is worth spending some time getting to know Flexbox and Grid layout, because they can save you a tremendous amount of time and energy on the long run and they really bring back fun to developing frontend layouts.
However... if this is a small static site, and you are fairly sure the content will not change, or will change very rarely and you are comfortable with repositioning a few elements from time to time, you might be better off positioning things manually, if you are not in the position to learn some CSS magic right now.
Also, positioning a few elements here and there using position is completely acceptable.
But for layouts at scale, I'd recommend to go with Flexbox or Grid.

Does responsive design have to be fluid layout? [closed]

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At the outset let me clarify - please do not point me to links about responsive designs. I have done enough googling for a life time, yet am here. I am looking for specific tips, not tutorials.
I had a fixed width layout web design till yesterday when a Google search result of my site announced that my site is not mobile friendly! And I took the Google mobile friendly test as advised. Of course, my website was declared unfriendly to mobiles as it would mean horizontal scrolling for users. However when I tried to make all my fixed width including body, containers etc fluid by using percentage, it looked splendid on my laptop. But browser resizing and mobile screen resolutions now make my pages look like hurricane hit!
I am hating the fluid thing and more so ever the responsive design thing! So much work in trying to decide how to redesign and still not able to make things work. I have tried using viewport, #media screen only, a separate CSS for specific screen size etc. I'm just about to explode! I have a website with a couple of thousand pages. Though I have common header and footer, I can't change the html/CSS of the inner parts of all pages. I am not able to even make a decent home page.
So my question is, is it still possible to have fixed width layout and still become mobile friendly ? That way I don't have to tear my hair to please Google! Or is there actually some tips to easily change my CSS to a responsive CSS or some converter program or CSS checker and adviser, etc? I believe Stack Overflow is a fixed width design and they still don't seem to have any trouble.
The site is here.
To answer your question, yes you need to have fluid measurements in order to create a mobile friendly site. There are certain elements that can have fixed measurements (i.e.: height of nav bar), but most need to be fluid, so that it can properly be displayed in both desktop and mobile settings.
The main problem with your site is that your grid is not properly done. It is incredibly time-consuming to create your own grid with rows and columns. I would recommend learning Bootstrap, a common CSS/JavaScript framework. Just the grid system alone (built only on CSS), would immensely cut down the time it would take to build your site, and fix most of the problems that exist due to your containers/rows not being responsive.
You can download Bootstrap at http://getbootstrap.com/, and in addition learn the grid from W3Schools http://www.w3schools.com/bootstrap/bootstrap_grid_system.asp

What are the steps to make a HTML design responsive? [closed]

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I just learned about responsive design. My question is what steps does a HTML designer has to do to make a design responsive?
It appears that a responsive design is all about using #media queries and controlling the flow of elements on the page if it gets resized by setting max-width, min-width and manipulating floating, margins and padding depending on browser window's size.
Is there anything else besides #media query that needs to be done for responsive design?
Responsive Images (different images in HTML for different situations) is an important one.
Few important bits :
Use of srcset attribute for switching between different versions of the same image.
http://responsiveimages.org is a well of resources on this subject.
Use of automation tools for imaging - One of my favorites is Grunt and here is a nice read about it: http://addyosmani.com/blog/generate-multi-resolution-images-for-srcset-with-grunt/
It really makes a lot of difference when user on mobile opens a page with images that are sized for it, less data and well faster loads :)
Tools like Grunt may seem like they take some work to setup but once you start working with it its so easy and fast.
More reading material:
https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization
http://blog.cloudfour.com/responsive-hero-images/
Absolutely. There are three main tenants of responsive web design from Ethan Marcotte's original book, Responsive Web Design (abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design). They are:
1 - Fluid Grids - percentage based widths instead of pixels for your layout/grid. This is arguably even more important than the media query as it allows websites to be fluid and not fixed. So smart phones and tablets come in too many sizes to count, so having a fluid layout makes sure your design can fit nicely at different device widths.
2 - Flexible images - which are basically images that shrink when the browser get smaller. There are plenty of challenges around images in the context of responsive, which is why #Ivan86 smartly recommended using the srcset attribute on the image tag, which I also highly recommend but also maybe wait on that until you're comfortable with the basics. Since you're just starting out, let's keep it simple with 'flexible images' which are images that are set to max-width: 100% with a parent container around them that is % based. This allows the image to shrink as the parent container (div, figure, etc) gets smaller. However, if you do happen to be interested in srcset I posted two articles on this recently: www.richfinelli.com/srcset-part-1, http://www.richfinelli.com/srcset-part-2/ which explain how to use this new attribute.
3 - Media queries - as you said, are used in your css to change the layout based on available browser width.
As I think you're finding out, once you get in to responsive web design you realize there's multiple layers of challenges you can find yourself in. But I recommend buying Ethan Marcotte's book from abookapart.com to get a good jump on it. Very short and actually funny.

Flexbox vs Twitter Bootstrap (or similar framework) [closed]

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I have recently discovered Flexbox when I was looking for a solution to make divs the same hight, depending on the highest one.
I have read the following page on CSS-tricks.com and it convinced me that flexbox is a very powerful module to learn and use. However, it also made me think about the fact that Twitter Bootstrap (and similar frameworks) offer kind of the same functions (+ of course a lot extra) with their grid systems.
Now, the questions are: What are the pros and cons of flexbox? Is there something one can't do with Flexbox that one can do with a framework like Bootstrap (of course purely talking about the grid system)? Which one is faster when implemented on a website?
I'm guessing when only for the grid system, it's smarter to purely use flexbox, but what if you're already using a framework, is there something flexbox can add?
Are there any reasons to choose flexbox's "grid system" over a framework's?
For a couple of reasons, flexbox is much better than bootstrap:
Bootstrap uses floats to make the grid system, which many would say is not meant for the web, where flex-box does the opposite by staying flexible to the items' size and contents; same difference as using pixels vs em/rem, or like controlling your divs only using margins and padding and never setting a pre-defined size.
Bootstrap, because it uses floats, needs clearfix after each row, or you will get misaligned divs of different height. Flex-box doesn't do that and instead checks for the tallest div in the container and sticks to its height.
The only reason I would go with bootstrap over flex-box is lack of browser support (IE mainly) (die already). And sometimes you get different behavior from Chrome and Safari even though both use the same webkit engine.
Edit:
BTW if the only problem you are facing is the equal height columns, there are quite a few solutions for that:
You can use display: table on the parent, an display: table-cell; on the child. See How to get same height in display:table-cell
You can use absolute positioning on each div:
position: absolute;
top: 0;
bottom: 0;
There is also the jquery/JS solution, and another solution I can't remember at the moment that I'll try to add later.
Edit 2:
Also check http://chriswrightdesign.com/experiments/flexbox-adventures/ & https://scotch.io/tutorials/a-visual-guide-to-css3-flexbox-properties on how flex-box works.
Edit 3:
https://kyusuf.com/post/almost-complete-guide-to-flexbox-without-flexbox
Edit 4:
https://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox
I havent use Flexbox (I have read about it and seems to be great) but I'm a Bootstrap frontend dev. I suggest you test Flexbox printing pages before making a final decision. You know... Sometimes printing styles are a terrible headache and Bootstrap helps me a lot when I have to design print formats.
I am afraid you missed another article on CSS tricks:
Note: Flexbox layout is most appropriate to the components of an application, and small-scale layouts, while the Grid layout is intended for larger scale layouts.
Does not mean, you may not try, but just think twice. And all depends on desired browser support in the end.