Journal tags: layout

24

Re-tabulate

Right after I wrote about combining flexbox with responsive design—to switch the display of content and navigation based on browser size—I received an email from Raphaël Goetter. He pointed out a really elegant solution to the same use-case that makes use of display:table.

Let’s take the same markup as before:

<body>
<div role="main">
<p>This is the main content.</p>
</div>
<nav role="navigation">
<p>This is the navigation.</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="#">foo</a></li>
<li><a href="#">bar</a></li>
<li><a href="#">baz</a></li>
</ol>
</nav>
</body>

The source order reflects the order I want on small-screen devices (feature phones, smart phones, etc.). Once the viewport allows it, I’d like to put that navigation at the top. I can do this by wrapping some display declarations in a media query:

@media screen and (min-width: 30em) {
    body {
        display: table;
        caption-side: top;
    }
    [role="navigation"] {
        display: table-caption;
    }
}

That’s it. It works much like box-orient:vertical with box-direction:reverse but because this is good ol’ CSS 2.1, it’s very well supported.

We can solve the other issue too: making those list items display horizontally on larger screens:

[role="navigation"] ol {
    display: table-row;
}
[role="navigation"] ol li {
    display: table-cell;
}

Once again, I’ve put a gist up on Github (get me! I’m like a proper computer nerd).

Update: And Remy has put it on JSbin so you can see it in action (resize the live preview pane).

So there you go: we’ve at least two different mechanisms in CSS to re-order the display of content and navigation in response to screen real-estate. The default is content first, navigation second—a pattern that Luke talked about in this interview with Jared:

Yeah, one of the design principles that I’ll be talking on the tour about, for mobile, is content first, navigation second; which is just really putting something up right away that somebody can engage with, and saving the pivoting and the navigating for later.

There’s, basically, UI patterns that you can use to make that happen. I’m still surprised at how many, both mobile websites and applications, the first thing they give you is a menu of choices, instead of content.

Don’t get me wrong, the menu’s important, and you can get to it, but it’s actually the content that the immediacy of mobile, and the fact that you’re probably on a slower network, and in some cases you’re even paying for your data transfers, right? Giving you a list of choices as your first time experience tends not to work so well.

Re-flex

I was in Minnesota last week for An Event Apart Minneapolis. A great time was had by all. Not only were the locals living up to their reputation with Amy and Kasia demonstrating that Kristina isn’t an outlier in the super-nice, super-smart Minnesotan data sample, but the conference itself was top-notch too. It even featured some impromptu on-stage acrobatics by Stan.

A recurring theme of the conference—right from Zeldman’s opening talk—was Content First. In Luke’s talk it was more than a rallying cry; it was a design pattern he recommends for mobile: content first, navigation second. It makes a lot of sense when your screen real estate is at a premium. You can see this pattern in action on the Bagcheck mobile site (a button at the top of screen is simply a link that leads to the fragment identifier for the navigation at the bottom).

Later on, Eric was diving deep into the guts of the CSS3 flexible box layout module and I saw an opportunity to join some dots.

Let’s say I’ve got a document like this with the content first and the navigation second:

<body>
<div role="main">
<p>This is the main content</p>
</div>
<nav role="navigation">
<p>This is the navigation</p>
</nav>
</body>

Using box-orient:vertical and box-direction:reverse on the body element, I can invert the display of those two children from the order they appear in the source:

body {
    display: box;
    box-orient: vertical;
    box-direction: reverse;
}

If I wrap that in a media query, I can get the best of both worlds: content first, navigation second on small screens; navigation first, content second on larger viewports:

@media screen and (min-width: 30em) {
    body {
        display: box;
        box-orient: vertical;
        box-direction: reverse;
    }
}

Works a treat (once you include the necessary -webkit and -moz prefixes).

I thought I’d take it a bit further. Suppose the navigation has a list of links:

<nav role="navigation">
<p>This is the navigation.</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="#">foo</a></li>
<li><a href="#">bar</a></li>
<li><a href="#">baz</a></li>
</ol>
</nav>

I could use flexbox to lay those items out horizontally instead of vertically once the viewport is large enough:

@media screen and (min-width: 30em) {
    [role="navigation"] ol {
        display: box;
        box-orient: horizontal;
    }
    [role="navigation"] li {
        box-flex: 1;
    }
}

Here’s the weird thing: in Webkit—Safari and Chrome—the list items reverse their direction: “baz, bar, foo” instead of “foo, bar, baz.” It seems that the box-direction value of reverse is being inherited from the body element, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the right behaviour. But it can be easily counteracted by explicitly declaring box-direction: normal on the navigation.

What’s a little trickier to figure out is why Firefox is refusing to space the list items equally. I’ve put a gist on Github if you want to take a look for yourself and see if you can figure out what’s going on.

Update: You can see it in action on JSbin (resize the view panel).

The new CSS3 layout modules and responsive design could potentially be a match made in heaven …something that Stephen has been going on about for a while now. Check out his talk at Mobilism earlier this year.

You’ll notice that he’s using a different syntax in his presentation; that’s because the spec has changed. In my example, I’m using the syntax that’s currently supported in Webkit, Gecko and Internet Explorer. And, as Eric pointed out in his talk, even when the newer syntax is supported, the older vendor-prefixed syntax won’t be going anywhere.

New Year’s Resolution

In a comment on Roger’s post about fixed and liquid layouts, Cameron wrote:

This issue seems to generate a heated debate every time it’s mentioned. I imagine one could pen an article with the headline “Fluid or fixed?” and nothing else, and yet dozens of comments would inevitably appear.

But rather than use that title, I couldn’t resist borrowing a pun from Andy, prompted by a post from Scrivs called What Resolution Will You Design for in 2007? (a classic example of the fallacy of many questions).

Now, firstly, we need to draw a distinction between monitor size and browser size. In other words, the difference between screen resolution and the viewport size:

There’s a real danger in thinking that “the numbers speak for themselves.” Numbers don’t speak for themselves; numbers need to be interpreted.

The numbers clearly show that monitor sizes and resolutions are getting bigger. The most common interpretation of that is more and more people have bigger displays. But an equally valid interpretation of the numbers is the range of displays is bigger than ever. It’s a subtle but important distinction. One interpretation focuses solely on the size of the highest numbers; the other interpretation focuses on the range of all the numbers.

The way I see it, the range is growing at both ends of the spectrum. Yes, desktop monitors are getting wider (though that doesn’t mean that viewports get any wider above a certain size) but handheld and gaming devices are likely to remain at the lower end of the scale. The Wii, for example, has a resolution of 640 x 480.

Mind you, the iPhone turns the whole question on its head with its scalable browsing. At MacWorld, Steve Jobs demonstrated this by visiting the New York Times, an unashamedly wide fixed-width website. On the Apple site, Wikipedia—a liquid layout— is shown fitting nicely on the display. The iPhone deals with both. Still, rather than letting my liquid layouts scale down to the iPhone’s width, I should probably start putting a min-width value on the body element.

Speaking of which…

A common argument against using liquid layouts is the issue of line lengths. On the face of it, this seems like a valid argument. Readability is supremely important and nobody likes over-long line lengths. But it’s not quite as simple as that when it comes to readability on screen compared to print, as Richard noted:

Surprisingly, I find short line lengths tiresome on screen; I don’t really subscribe to the empirical prescription of 7–10 words per line for comfortable reading. Most novels have 10–15 words per line and I think the upper region of that range is more appropriate for screen.

In any case, the idea that liquid layouts automatically means long line lengths on large screens is, I feel, a misconception. The problem is that a lot of the examples of liquid layouts aren’t very good and line lengths do expand without limit. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

In my opinion, the most important addition to Internet Explorer 7 is the max-width property. It means that we can now really start to look at creating fluid layouts within defined parameters, as demonstrated by Cameron in Andy’s book. In fact, I think we’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible in creating seamless adaptive layouts (and, more importantly, seamless adaptive page elements) using the dual power of max-width and min-width.

That still leaves Internet Explorer 6 and below. Should they get unbounded fluid layouts or should they get a fixed width fallback? The second is certainly an option using conditional comments, which is the Microsoft-approved way of dealing with rendering inconsistencies. I think that the lack of support for max-width certainly falls into that category. Call it transcending CSS if you will; I call it routing around damage on the designer’s network.

I want to hear what you have to say… if you’ve got something new to say. Let’s not just rehash the same old arguments that would inevitably appear had I simply asked “Fluid or fixed?”

Fixtorati

Technorati has been redesigned, or realigned if you prefer. It’s gone a bit gradient happy but overall, it’s quite a pleasing visual aesthetic.

For some reason though, they’ve chosen to lock the pages into a fixed width of 1024 pixels.

Now, I understand the reasoning behind fixed-width layouts. I can see the justification for wide fixed-width layouts on content-heavy sites like A List Apart (even if I disagree with it). But forcing users of what is fundamentally a web app to set their browser to a certain width seems counterproductive to me.

The content on Technorati is user-generated. Usually, that user is me. It has my favourites, my watchlist, and my search terms. I should be able to interact with that content in my way.

This is something that, as with so many things, del.icio.us gets just right. Upcoming is on the right track too. These sites allow me to interact with my data without putting me in a straitjacket.

Flickr is still avowedly fixed but the image-based, rather than text-based, nature of the data I store there makes this somewhat understandable.

Now, don’t misconstrue this as a tirade against 1024 pixel wide layouts. The problem would still exist in an 800 pixel wide design. Choosing an arbitrary number of pixels in which to serve up user-generated content is the issue here. On the one hand, Technorati is a very Web 2.0 sort of site, based on user-generated distributed content and collective wisdom. On the other hand, its visual design is grounded in a very Web 1.0 idea of top-down control and inflexibility.

I like Technorati a lot. It’s come on in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years. I’d like to use it every day. I’m even willing to put up with the oversize ads. But I resent the feeling that I should adjust my browsing environment to the needs of the site, rather than the other way around.