Learn Flexbox, Polymer and Webstorm

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.

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Create a Landing Page with CSS Grid and Flexbox

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

This playlist covers various aspects of CSS including different rules, selectors, and patterns

CSS Tips and Tricks

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

Polymer is a framework created at Google for building reusable web components.

We use HTML elements every day such as div, a, button, form, and table. All HTML elements provide some sort of API of attributes, properties, methods and events that we use to manipulate them. Generally, web elements are styled in a particular way by default, and also allow us to customize their styling with CSS.

Polymer allows you to build fully custom web elements of your own for more complex components composed of the building blocks you are used to with the standard set of HTML elements.

This course is an introduction to Polymer, and should get you started building your own customizable web elements that you can use on their own, or even with your favorite framework like Angular or React!

The Polymer library provides a set of features for creating custom elements. These features are designed to make it easier and faster to make custom elements that work like standard DOM elements.

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Creating Custom Web Elements with Polymer 2

After setting `display: flex` on a parent element, you can use `flex-direction` to switch the container to be either a `row` or a `column`.

We also switch the body between `row` and `column`.

Flex into a Row or a Column with flex-direction

We can space items inside of a flexed component in the "on-axis" direction, with `justify-content`.

Justify content can take the following values: `flex-start`, `flex-end`, `center`, `space-between`, `space-around`, or `space-evenly`

Change the Spacing of Flexed Components with justify-content

We changed the axis layout with 'justify-content', and the "off axis" layout is controlled by 'align-items'.  The most common values are `flex-start`, `flex-end`, or `center`.

Change the off-axis Alignment of a Flexed Container with `align-items`

To set the wrap settings of elements inside of a container, we can set the `flex-wrap` css attribute.  The most common values are: `nowrap`, `wrap`, or `wrap-reverse`

Wrap Elements Inside of a Flexed Container with `flex-wrap`

To stretch individual elements to fit the given space, we can set the `flex-grow` or `flex` attributes to any integer.  Other surrounding elements will grow proportionally to their `flex-grow` or `flex` attributes.

Proportionally Grow a Flexed Element by Setting `flex-grow` or `flex` Styles

We have a parent HTML element that takes up the height and width of the page. We will make that parent element into a flex container, and then vertically center its child element using `align-items: center;`. Finally, we'll use `justify-content: center;` to horizontally center the element.

Center an Element Horizontally and Vertically using Flexbox

Learn the fundamental difference between CSS grid and flexbox layout, and create utility classes for each `display` value. Then begin to apply and expand these concepts to style the landing page navigation.

Choose Between Grid or Flexbox for CSS Layout

See how to use flexbox to layout variable-width content in columns, and take advantage of `justify-content` to keep flex children center-aligned on smaller viewports. We'll also learn how `margin` can be applied to resolve for lack of a well-supported `gap` property in flexbox. At the end of the lesson, we'll have styled both the "Subscribe" section and the site footer.

Use Flexbox to Responsively Layout Variable-Width Content

CSS Grid and Flexbox are very useful tools for providing the overall layout of a page.  I take a specific design and create the high level layout using css grid and then arrange an individual section using flex box.

Layout a webpage using css grid and flexbox

With just a handful of CSS properties, we can create an intrinsically responsive photo gallery using flexbox. This is accomplished by setting our preferred width as the `flex-basis` value and allowing items to both shrink and grow. The use of `object-fit: cover` on images allows them to fully fill up the list item without distortion or overflow. We finish the gallery with a small animated effect that alters `opacity`.

Create an Automatically Responsive Flexbox Gallery

Demystifying alignment in flexbox children

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

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When exploring a new framework or technology, it is nice to have a seed project or sandbox so you can just get in and start playing. Let's build our React playground using npm, browserify, 6to5, and more within WebStorm!

Setting up a React Playground Dev Environment

In this lesson we'll look at creating event listeners in our custom element using the listeners object as well as annotated event listeners.

Create Event Listeners in Polymer Elements

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.

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