And on the second one, you could use any other unit instead of fr for the image to set its width consistently, then fr on the text to have it use up whatever remains.
I also wasn't understanding the value looking at the first two examples, but the pricing packages example I do think I would struggle to implement in a clean way using traditional css.
Yes, for that specific example it works. But in general, this essentially deletes the UL from the layout entirely. It won't be stylable[0] and it won't dispatch UI events that occur on it specifically.
One example of a reason you might want such an element to still participate in layout is to use that element as an area highlighter. Or you might make it a scrollable section; subgrid makes sticky-header tables rather trivial to implement now.
[0] Well, I can't remember right now if it's unstylable or if its height just ends up zero, but either way, it might not be what you expect.
One subtle thing worth adding is that display: contents also changes how accessibility trees are constructed. The element is removed from the visual layout and from the accessibility tree in many browsers, so semantics like list grouping, landmarks, or ARIA roles can disappear unless you re-introduce them manually.
That’s why subgrid ends up filling a different niche: you preserve the DOM structure, preserve accessibility semantics, and still let the children participate in the parent’s track sizing. It costs more than contents, but it avoids a lot of the accidental side-effects that show up once you start mixing layout, semantics, and interactivity.
Yeah this is a good callout. My understanding is that display: contents is not meant to impact the accessibility tree but there is a long and ongoing history of browser bugs that make me not want to use it for elements that have an accessible role
From my testing, as far as I've been able to tell it no longer has any impact on accessibility. The element itself does not appear in the tree, this makes sense display:contents is non-interactive. But all of the children correctly appear in the accessibility tree as if they did not have that shared parent element. But I am by no means an expert at operating screen readers, do you know of any specific issues with it?
Yeah, though I find in practice I use `display: contents` far more than I do subgrid. Contents effectively deletes the node for layout purposes, but it still participates in the CSS cascade so you can use it in selectors, even `:hover` works when a child gets hovered, or use it as the origin for inheritable properties.
The pricing UI example is exactly the type of thing I had to build a few years ago. Deceptively simple, two tables for comparison, but the rows need to line up.
Impossible without subgrid, either you need to have fixed heights or calculate heights with JS, but neither is elegant or simple, especially if you have react components and adhere to modular design, and you need to have those components agree on sizing.
Isn't this also what container queries solve better? I guess maybe you want to be sure that the whole grid remains consistent instead of relying on individual containers possibly making their own decisions. So many new features to investigate, so little time :) https://codepen.io/web-dot-dev/pen/rNrbPQw
Container queries don't solve the responsive to sibling sizes issue that grid/flex can solve. And frustratingly container queries force your container element to be a new stacking context, unlike flex/grid.
I am sad that using containers and subgrids together doesn't work. Being able to query the size of the subgrid from a child element would be super powerful.
Random grid gotcha that drove me crazy some time ago: due to browser bugs we can't use <img> elements with percentage widths or heights as grid items. The grid cell dimensions get blown out to the ones of the original image. Seen in both Firefox and Chromium. Relevant FF bug is probably https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1857365 '<img> grid item with percentage height, "width: auto", "grid-template-columns: auto", and no track stretching makes column to have the same width of the original image's width' (although someone there claims it works in Chromium).
This sounds useful, but the example of the feature rows reminds me how sad it is that CSS sometimes requires adding information about the document structure to make a layout work. In this case the number of rows.
Ideally, we would have a way to align elements even when they don't share a parent. Or maybe a flex container that can have its layout mimic another flex container so the distribution in them can line up. It seems that there are a lot of heuristics and edge cases though to keep a simple DX.
Yes and no. <table> layouts were a hack that solved a real problem but came with massive downsides. People didn’t tell you to not use <table> to lay out content because grids are bad (they are quite handy! take a look at Grid Systems by Josef Müller-Brockmann) but because <table> both posed technical and accessibility problems. A layout grid is not a table (or a <table
>). A table (with and without <>) comes with attached semantics, hierarchy, reading direction etc. and is extremely rigid, which makes it a bad fit for differing screen sizes.
It’s true that this was a blind spot for a long time and that it was frustrating to not be able to efficiently lay out content in 2D when <table> was just there. But it was the wrong choice then as it is now and it has been baseline available for 8 years now. I hope it won’t take another 8 years until the comparison stops :o)
They don't! Layout grids are less about the rows and columns and more about the lines separating them (which is why those get a lot of attention in CSS grid). Take a look at how layout grids are used in design and you will quickly find examples that are extremely inconvenient to realize with HTML tables. I'm sure it can be done and I'm sure some poor email marketing dev had to, but the result would be entirely static and not able to reflow.
You have just restated the similarity I referred to. The ways they are different make them important enough to distinguish.
“Tabulate” doesn’t just mean organising anything by rows and columns, it means organising data for a particular purpose. And layout grids usually end up looking quite different to tables because although they have a broadly similar underlying structure, the purpose is quite different.
I think CSS grid is too powerful to be represented in markup. I rotated the idea in my head for a bit but the most I could come up was elements that covered a small subset of CSS grid and which completely lost the entire appeal of being able to handle tracks dynamically.
Yes. I built layouts like this with automatic server-rendered tables 25 years ago, and they just worked with very little effort.
Tables weren't responsive or accessible or any of the other things we now recognize as essential, but it has certainly taken a long time to reinvent the table wheel. And all the while we've had to listen to people screaming in our ears that tables were bad, while also listening to them argue about which of their incredibly difficult and patently subpar "solutions" we were supposed to use instead.
I agree. I got really tired of hearing tables are for tabular data! For 20+ years. My reply was always, Who cares if it accomplished the layout you want. If the meaning of a word is what got people so hung up... why not go and make a new css term that did what tables did but improve on it. Now 20+ years later, that is pretty much what they did.
There's plenty of overlap, but they solve different problems: flexbox when the content should control element sizing/fit, grid when the container should control element sizing/fit.
Another way to think about it: flexbox is for alignment of boxes in one dimension: horizontally or vertically.
CSS Grid is for two dimensional layout of rows and columns.
Back in the day, developers wanted page layout instead of the hacks on top of hacks with table-based layouts, floats and positioning to create layouts.
We’ve had CSS Grid designed for page layout on the web, in all browsers since 2017; as of 2022, only 12% of the top 1 million websites used CSS Grid, which to me is ridiculously low.
I use flexbox for grid purposes, simply because the syntax is straightforward and easy to read. Yeah, it’s one dimension, but if you nest it, it becomes two with no issues.
With nested flexbox the nested dimensions are not aligned to each other.
With grid the items are aligned across both each row AND each column.
With subgrid even nested grids can be aligned across nesting levels.
I agree. I occasionally turn to them to see if they work in a new setting, but find they never expose the features of a grid I would find useful. Everything must be manually placed, rather than allowing content to intelligently snap to multiple axes. Possibly I never have grasped some fundamental concept, possibly they are not suited to the sorts of layouts I usually work on. But more and more I feel they are designed to fulfil some purpose orthogonal to what I would need them to do.
I swear you that I had less hard time reading x86 assembly code or even c++ templates. I mean what the hell? Then if you go look at another example:
> @media (max-width: 32rem)
I know what rem means, I just don't know what the hell MAY mean, that alone in a big project will make you hate your job as sometimes it's more easier predicting what the response of an LLM may be than what styling an element will have on a live page
[Edit] I'm not confusing rem with em, em are even worse, but still hard predicting what a rem might be, before arguing we shouldn't I'd like to stress out we should once it's used like that "@media (max-width: 32rem)"
[Edit2] Instead of just downvoting why don't you reply with your counter arguments? I really am interested in hearing what you have to say
When I see the grid syntax, I just wanna jump off a cliff. Who created this abomination and why? We need trials to check whether these were the output of humans or some synthetics pretending to be humans.
I sympathize with your comment and imagine the overflowing downvotes as soon you openly critic the web/css/javascript and their people doing the standard. I watched tons of videos and read a lot on mdn about css grid, I don't touch it for a while I need to go back at it again... After tables/floats/abs positioning eventually convoluted flex we should have stopped and review what the heck people were doing on w3c, it's artificial complexity we don't deserve that
Am I the only one who sees "content boxes"/divs with content displayed in different widths as poor design? At least in the example given, I would think you would want the image and its associated content box to be the same size for all four and not have its content vary in width based on how much content it has.
But in terms of functionality, I'm sure there are plenty applications for this!
Yeah, to expand on that... Flex is, well, flexible, whereas Grid is more rigid like a table. The rigidity of Grid allows you to span rows and columns (2D) just like you can with table cells (colspan/rowspan). Grid is usually used at a macro level for its more deterministic layout (no unintuitive flex quirks), while flex is usually used to lay things out at a component level where you don't care that the next row of items isn't perfectly aligned with the ones above (you will often see it hold some buttons or badges, or vertically align text to an icon), and Grid setting the layout of the app and container components (modals, cards, etc).
So is Grid supposed to be what we should use to replace the html <table> element? That I still use to this day for layouts because CSS still sucks to me?
It's more like a comic book, you define the layout and the elements slot into that. You can define how many rows and columns your comic has and then you can make some panels fit exactly into one spot, or you can have panels that span more than one row or column. So it's more of a 2d design system.
Use <table> for tabular data, but for layout you should use grid. Grid doesn't have it's own element like table does, so you have to use css to apply that display to a div.
CSS takes a bit of time to understand. It's cascading nature and how certain properties behave differently based on the html structure or display type or direction makes it tricky. I don't blame you sticking with tables for layouts for yourself - making layouts with floats was a pain. Bootstrap hid a lot of the layout pain. But today we have flex and grid to help us realize our layouts.
> Grid doesn't have it's own element like table does, so you have to use css to apply that display to a div.
Well, OOTB, yeah. I personally like to make use of custom html elements a lot of the time for such things. Such as <main-header> <main-footer> <main-content> <content-header> etc, and apply css styles to those, rather than putting in classes onto divs. Feels a lot more ergonomic to me. Also gives more meaningful markup in the html. (and forces me to name the actual tags so I use much less unnecessary ones)
There were back in CSS 2 display values for table, table cell, table row etc which meant you could make divs or other block elements layout like tables did. Of course it wasn't supported in a certain browser with 90% market share.
No. The table is meant to hold tabular data like a spreadsheet. It has special behavior for people who use tools like screen readers because they have vision impairment.
CSS grid is a powerful layout tool. If you think CSS sucks I encourage you to brush up on the newer developments. Flex box and grid and many other newer tools solve a lot of the classic pain points with CSS and make it a pleasure to use if you invest the time to learn it
I use this thumb-rule while explaining them — Grid to Lay Layouts of distinct UI Blocks; while Flex is to layout contents, sometimes a continuous set of content.
This took two seconds to make https://codesandbox.io/p/sandbox/5ry4rl
I do agree though that subgrid makes the HTML more readable though so I'm all for it.
One example of a reason you might want such an element to still participate in layout is to use that element as an area highlighter. Or you might make it a scrollable section; subgrid makes sticky-header tables rather trivial to implement now.
[0] Well, I can't remember right now if it's unstylable or if its height just ends up zero, but either way, it might not be what you expect.
That’s why subgrid ends up filling a different niche: you preserve the DOM structure, preserve accessibility semantics, and still let the children participate in the parent’s track sizing. It costs more than contents, but it avoids a lot of the accidental side-effects that show up once you start mixing layout, semantics, and interactivity.
Impossible without subgrid, either you need to have fixed heights or calculate heights with JS, but neither is elegant or simple, especially if you have react components and adhere to modular design, and you need to have those components agree on sizing.
I am sad that using containers and subgrids together doesn't work. Being able to query the size of the subgrid from a child element would be super powerful.
I'm just confused by the "original image's width".
> "<img> elements with percentage widths or heights"
It’s true that this was a blind spot for a long time and that it was frustrating to not be able to efficiently lay out content in 2D when <table> was just there. But it was the wrong choice then as it is now and it has been baseline available for 8 years now. I hope it won’t take another 8 years until the comparison stops :o)
Ain't it? Rows and columns get you a table.
Layout grids organize data by rows and columns.
“Tabulate” doesn’t just mean organising anything by rows and columns, it means organising data for a particular purpose. And layout grids usually end up looking quite different to tables because although they have a broadly similar underlying structure, the purpose is quite different.
Tables weren't responsive or accessible or any of the other things we now recognize as essential, but it has certainly taken a long time to reinvent the table wheel. And all the while we've had to listen to people screaming in our ears that tables were bad, while also listening to them argue about which of their incredibly difficult and patently subpar "solutions" we were supposed to use instead.
/s
You're killing it, Josh. Thank you for writing and teaching us.
CSS Grid is for two dimensional layout of rows and columns.
Back in the day, developers wanted page layout instead of the hacks on top of hacks with table-based layouts, floats and positioning to create layouts.
We’ve had CSS Grid designed for page layout on the web, in all browsers since 2017; as of 2022, only 12% of the top 1 million websites used CSS Grid, which to me is ridiculously low.
A grid really feels like a list flexes to me too, functionally.
> @media (max-width: 32rem)
I know what rem means, I just don't know what the hell MAY mean, that alone in a big project will make you hate your job as sometimes it's more easier predicting what the response of an LLM may be than what styling an element will have on a live page
[Edit] I'm not confusing rem with em, em are even worse, but still hard predicting what a rem might be, before arguing we shouldn't I'd like to stress out we should once it's used like that "@media (max-width: 32rem)"
[Edit2] Instead of just downvoting why don't you reply with your counter arguments? I really am interested in hearing what you have to say
> This is mind-bending stuff, but it becomes intuitive with a bit of practice.
The problem is not the language, it's just that you did not spend enough time to learn it the proper way.
You can use ASCII art to “draw” your layout if you want to, which is quite accessible [1].
[1]: “Grid: how grid-template-areas offer a visual solution for your code” — https://webkit.org/blog/17620/grid-how-grid-template-areas-o...
[1]: https://m.youtube.com/layoutland
With subgrid the rows and columns of two sibling grids are aligned with each other by glueing them to the rows and columns of the parent grid.
But in terms of functionality, I'm sure there are plenty applications for this!
https://l-wortley0811-dp.blogspot.com/2010/10/comic-layoutsj...
CSS takes a bit of time to understand. It's cascading nature and how certain properties behave differently based on the html structure or display type or direction makes it tricky. I don't blame you sticking with tables for layouts for yourself - making layouts with floats was a pain. Bootstrap hid a lot of the layout pain. But today we have flex and grid to help us realize our layouts.
Well, OOTB, yeah. I personally like to make use of custom html elements a lot of the time for such things. Such as <main-header> <main-footer> <main-content> <content-header> etc, and apply css styles to those, rather than putting in classes onto divs. Feels a lot more ergonomic to me. Also gives more meaningful markup in the html. (and forces me to name the actual tags so I use much less unnecessary ones)
CSS grid is a powerful layout tool. If you think CSS sucks I encourage you to brush up on the newer developments. Flex box and grid and many other newer tools solve a lot of the classic pain points with CSS and make it a pleasure to use if you invest the time to learn it