
Unfortunately, CSS simply isn’t that amazing.
#Responsive layout css framework code
In the article, I provided a simple tool to allow you to calculate the values that you need by typing only two numbers, but I’ve always wished that this function could be performed right in the code so that you can simply paste in a CSS snippet that figures out the math for you. It’s actually very simple math, but it sounds like a nightmare when you explain it. First you have to divide the container width by the number of columns, then you have to multiply the desired individual column margin by the number of columns minus one, subtract that number from the total width, then divide by the total number of columns again. For a given layout, you need to manually figure out what the column width percentage and margin percentage to use. There’s only one problem with this method: the math. Using percentages for width and margin allow us to instantly create multi-column layouts with zero fluff. In this article I outlined a super simple system that uses a tiny bit of code: I recently came pretty close to my dream layout system in my article titled Rolling Your Own Grid Layouts on the Fly Without a Framework. It’s often the case that you don’t even use half the code in a framework but you leave it there anyway just to be sure you’re not screwing anything up.

Customizing any part could take hours of sorting through code to make sure your tweak doesn’t break anything. Instead you get a big file and a bunch of class names that you’re forced to work with. This is the trickiest part as CSS frameworks don’t typically offer this kind of flexibility.

Next, I want something that is easily customizable as I implement it.
#Responsive layout css framework manual
Fully manual layout often isn’t so difficult that I can justify adding bloated layout systems that no one understands to the mix. Mounds and mounds of non-semantic, ugly classes don’t do much for me.

First, I want something that requires a very small code base. The answers are fairly basic, but they’re a tall order. Over the past year or two I’ve given a lot of thought into what I want in a layout system. “You don’t even use half the code in a framework but you leave it there anyway just to be sure you’re not screwing anything up.”
