Item Flow, Part 1: A new unified concept for layout

I really wish the CSS designers would drop “shorthand”.

CSS is complex enough without giving alternative names to things.

One syntax is enough .

I kinda feel like CSS is already feature complete. I know they listed things that can't easily be done currently but I'm not upset about that.

That’s what Microsoft said about IE6.

css grid is a real grid. it can do masonry just fine. what they want is a shuffle feature.

Can't wait to learn the three-letter Tailwind names for these things!

I tend to agree, but have softened on this, not only but also because of the handy devtools feature to expand them.

I do use them for margin, padding, inset.

Others I dislike a bit, for example I hate the one for background whenever things get complex. Others I don't like, but have become used to, for example the "flex" shorthand. I prefer separate flex-grow, flex-shrink and flex-basis properties.

Downside (and sometimes, intended upside!) to all of them is how they interact with inheritance and the cascade, i.e. accidentally overriding properties. OTOH it can prevent you from forgetting to override inherited properties.

Since the properties for which a shorthand exists often are closely related, this can be an upside.

The one in the article I still have to digest.

if-bfrw\[auto\ 24px\]

see, a full masonry layout using just one CSS class!

You can put 4 divs side by side in many ways, then jut put images in it.

One neat thing about them is that you can combine, for instance, all font-* properties into a single variable for reuse.

Looks nice, and I'm glad they put some effort to fit into the current properties and capabilities. It felt like in past, examples such as adding CSS grid syntax was really different/idiosyncratic for unclear reasons.

I mean, this is just this https://xkcd.com/927/ actually happening.

Clearly, the answer is more standards!

Item Flow is a unified system that could generalize and replace today's layout-type specific Flexbox, Grid, and Masonry, and along with simplifying layout, would unlock new abilities.

> As we worked through the details, we started to get excited. Suddenly new features for Flexbox and Grid that people have wanted for years had an obvious home. Things seemed to click together elegantly. New capabilities emerged: (1) Flexbox could gain a way to do dense packing. (2) Grid could gain the ability to turn off wrapping (3) Masonry layouts could now be triggered with a value for item-flow, and more…