Learn Flexbox, Mdx and Svelte

It's tempting to pick up a framework which has preselected flexbox or grid as the layout tool of choice, but it's important to learn when and why to use each method. This leads to slimmer stylesheets which results in better site performance, and less likelihood for "hacks" to make one method do what the other does inherently better. 

Throughout this collection, we will be progressively styling a responsive landing page template while building your knowledge on when to select grid or flexbox for any layout scenario. Spoiler alert: sometimes the best solution is using both!

The specification describes a CSS box model optimized for user interface design. In the flex layout model, the children of a flex container can be laid out in any direction, and can “flex” their sizes, either growing to fill unused space or shrinking to avoid overflowing the parent.

flexbox

Create a Landing Page with CSS Grid and Flexbox

JavaScript community has been shaken recently by a release of Svelte 3 and for a good reason - it's a completely different approach than React or Vue. To quote the docs:

"[Svelte](https://svelte.dev/) is a radical new approach to building user interfaces. Whereas traditional frameworks like React and Vue do the bulk of their work in the browser, Svelte shifts that work into a compile step that happens when you build your app."

**The best part?** If you have 26 spare minutes you can learn the basics of Svelte 3 and start building your own apps with it!

Enjoy!



The magical disappearing UI framework

 - The web's JavaScript bloat crisis, solved. Svelte turns your templates into tiny, framework-less vanilla JavaScript.
 - Simple and familiar. Build apps out of composable, easy-to-write blocks using languages you already know.
 - Super fast, rock solid. Compile-time static analysis ensures the browser does no more work than it needs to.

svelte

Up and running with Svelte 3

Flexbox is a powerful way to layout HTML so that elements can grow to fit the size of their container.  It can also control how the elements are positioned within a flexed container.  

Once you start thinking in `rows` and `columns`, you can control almost any flexed layout with just a few simple flexbox layout primitives.

Get Started with Flexbox CSS Layouts

Flexbox is a wonderful tool built into the CSS specification. Using flexbox doesn't require any special framework or library, just a browser with CSS3 support. It is so awesome, and makes the arranging elements on a page almost fun!

Flexbox Fundamentals

MDX has grown rapidly since the first commit two and a half years ago. We'd like to celebrate our accomplishments so far, and talk about what lies ahead. We've got lots of plans.
Learn how MDX increases developer productivity, improves educational content authoring, and even peek behind the curtains to see how MDX works.

MDX is an authorable format that lets you seamlessly use JSX in your markdown documents. You can import components, like interactive charts or notifications, and export metadata. This makes writing long-form content with components a blast.



MDX Conf 2020

Demystifying alignment in flexbox children

Flexbox makes it easier to create layouts that can adjust depending on the content that is added and the space available. In this lesson we look at a couple real-world applications of Flexbox in an application and website.

Using Flexbox in Websites and Applications

The flex-basis property allows us to define the dimension (along the flex-direction axis) that a flexbox child should ideally have.

Defining dimensions on flexbox children using flex-basis

Flex-basis lets us set the ideal dimensions for a flexbox child, but flex-shrink lets us define what should happen if there isn't enough room, and flex-grow can define what happens when there is too much room.

Using flex-shrink and flex-grow to make flexbox children resize correctly

Using the `order` property we alter the order in which flexbox children appear on the page, without making changes to the dom.

Using order to rearrange flexbox children

The flex shorthand makes it easier to declare flex-shrink, flex-grow, and flex-basis, but it sometimes has unexpected results because the defaults differ.

Combining the flexbox sizing properties using the flex shorthand

The Flexbox css spec allows for more adjustable layouts. The `flex-direction` property allows you to easily change the layout on the children of an element without making any changes to the dom, which is particularly useful when combined with media queries.

Using flex-direction to layout content horizontally and vertically

Adding flex-wrap to a flexbox container allows the items to form a grid. The content can then be aligned and distributed along the grid using justify-content and align-content.

Turning a flexbox into a grid using flex-wrap and align-content

React Native lets you build mobile apps using only JavaScript. It uses the same design as React, letting you compose a rich mobile UI from declarative components.

react-native

React Native utilizes flexbox for layout, and you can apply styles inline, or via external stylesheets. We will learn about both approaches, and create some basic styles for a native application.

For getting your application setup, you might want to checkout [this lesson](https://egghead.io/lessons/react-react-native-up-and-running?course=react-native-fundamentals&from=react-applying-styles-in-react-native)

Applying Basic Styles in React Native

In this lesson you will learn how to attach Event Handlers to buttons and input fields. Event handlers normally follows the `on:[event]` format. If you are making use of two way binding you should use `bind:` instead, for example an input field could use bind:value.

Use Event Handlers in Svelte 2

Svelte is a new approach to building user interfaces. 

Instead of doing the vast majority of work at the runtime as other frameworks do, Svelte shifts that work into the _compile_ step which happens when you build your app. As such, you're shipping heavily optimized code to your users.

In this quick lesson we are going to learn how to create a brand new project with Svelte 3 from scratch.

Create a new project with Svelte 3

In most Web applications we want to be able to render different HTML markup depending on values passed in from JavaScript code.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to render JavaScript variable in HTML markup when using Svelte 3.

Add data to HTML markup using Svelte 3

In Svelte 3, the same as in regular HTML we can add CSS styles to a component and this is what we're going to learn in this lesson.

Important note - styles are _scoped to the component_ which means that if we style a `h1` tag in component A, it won't automatically affect `h1` tags in component B.

Add styles to Svelte 3 component

It's highly unlikely that we'd like to have an entire app in a single file. Instead, what we'd like to do is to spread our code across multiple components and render them in one another.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to create a `<Surname />` Svelte 3 component which we're going to use in our main `App.svelte` file to display a user's surname.

Create a new Svelte 3 component to render it inside of another component

One of the key advantages of having a component system is the ability to render the component differently based on what kind of properties (shortened to 'props' in Svelte) were passed in to the component.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to declare properties inside of a Svelte component and how to pass in data to be rendered inside of a `<UserInfo />` component. We're also going to learn how to use default props which are used if a value for a property was not passed in.

Declare and pass in properties to a Svelte 3 component

Svelte automatically updates the DOM when your component's state changes. Often, some parts of a component's state need to be computed from other parts. This is where _reactive declarations_ come in.

In this lesson we are going to learn how to use reactive declarations to re-compute (and render) square of a counter value in a simple counter example whenever user clicks on a button.