32 comments

  • Tom HareTom Hare, 9 years ago

    Interested to see what they come up with but Flexbox is a way off production readiness yet.

    I've not used Foundation for a couple of years so can't really comment on it's innovation since (I certainly liked it before) but I really wish they'd sort out their naming. This is gibberish.

    5 points
    • Nathan GathrightNathan Gathright, 9 years ago

      HTML5 Please believes its good to go, but recommends using a mix old and new flexbox for maximum browser support. I'd still like to see a polyfill with the new spec.

      2 points
      • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

        We're definitely looking at all the possibilities. The different syntaxes are murdering out brains, but we're going for as much browser support as feasible.

        1 point
    • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

      Thanks for the comments!

      We're looking at all the ways to keep browser support. We're almost there and want to be ready when the adaption happens. It's also important to keep in mind that this is for Foundation For Apps, not for foundation for sites, so for now browser support will still exist for marketing sites and such.

      As for the syntax we're not SUPER happy with it either, but we're hoping the community can help us come up with things that are more manageable. When all is said and done you'll still be able to use Sass to use no presentational classes.

      Thanks for the convo and feel free to hit me up on twitter if you want to talk more about it. @brandon_arnold

      2 points
      • Tom HareTom Hare, 9 years ago

        Presentational classes are no bad thing as long as they're readable.

        Class names like one-quarter or 1/4 make a whole lot more sense than trying to work out how wide small-6 will be inside a small-8.

        4 points
        • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago (edited 9 years ago )

          Yeah, we've discussed things like quarter and such. We've been so engrained in a 12 columns grid, that sometimes it's scary, even for us, to break free.

          What divisions would you recommend? one-quarter, one-third, one-half?

          0 points
          • Tom HareTom Hare, 9 years ago

            All fractions from 1 to 1/12 * 100%. It's unlikely that you need a percentage that isn't covered by that range.

            The whole '2 of 8' thing just doesn't make sense to me. Let's use the currency of responsive web design and call it 25% or one quarter.

            0 points
            • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

              The bummer of this is that classes can't start with numbers, we're toying with giving it much more powerful mixin, so people can just roll their own syntax to use.

              0 points
              • Tom HareTom Hare, 9 years ago

                It is actually possible to use the fraction classes in conjunction with the tilde equals (~=1/2) selector which targets spaced lists but the plain English one-quarter is nicer.

                A mixin with namespacing would be a great solution.

                0 points
          • Mike HallMike Hall, 9 years ago

            Lately I've been playing around with dropping the "one-". So I just use "half", "third", "quarter" etc.

            0 points
    • Clay MacTavishClay MacTavish, 9 years ago

      What is gibberish about that?

      0 points
  • Derryl CarterDerryl Carter, 9 years ago

    Thank God somebody figured out how to use flexbox

    2 points
  • Account deleted 9 years ago

    Looks very promissing, I am considering moving away from Bootstrap and use Foundation instead.

    1 point
    • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

      Thanks, man!

      3 points
    • Floyd WilliamsonFloyd Williamson, 9 years ago

      I dislike frameworks in general due to the unavoidable bloat. That said, if I had to use one, Foundation has been consistently more exciting than Bootstrap.

      5 points
      • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

        Thanks for the nice words! First off, we think bootstrap has done well, just with a different focus than Foundation. Mark Otto is a former ZURBian and in genral just a really nice guy. As for Frameworks as a whole, there's tons we've done in Foundation 5 (current Foundation) to limit the bloat, like using sass partials to only import what you ended up using.

        There are also things like uncss that can remove the css your pages didn't use, so that way you're literally only importing the classes you used in your markup.

        All and all we can understand the want to roll your own for production work if thats what you're more comfortable with. I was at the New york times this summer seeing how they use Foundation in a prototyping and testing stage, so they can benefit form the rapid creation of code. We're building a tool we use for production work for our client work and just love if it can help others in some ways too.

        3 points
        • Floyd WilliamsonFloyd Williamson, 9 years ago (edited 9 years ago )

          I appreciate that a framework would be easier for large teams, which I was not thinking about when I wrote my comment. I tend to work on teams of 10 or less, so I that tends to be my default mindset.

          In any case, I love what you guys have done with the latest Foundation, especially the focus on Flexbox. Very cool!

          0 points
      • Clay MacTavishClay MacTavish, 9 years ago

        Have you worked on large scale projects that will be inherited by another team?

        We (4 devs) are going to be handed over a huge CMS contains 27 websites and I wish they had used a framework that makes sense.

        Besides dev time is so much faster and all the bullshit floating, responsive wrapping, rem based calcs are already worked out. We use Foundation for almost every project now. It's great.

        0 points
        • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

          Thanks, Kevin! Would love to see what you've built.

          0 points
          • Clay MacTavishClay MacTavish, 9 years ago (edited 9 years ago )

            Building an internal Dashboard for the company. It aggregates site/app data across all of our markets. It's pretty much a collection of one page apps and other tools. The thing is a beast that includes D3.js/C3.js, SASS, Gulp, Laravel, Angular, Backbone). Messing with vanilla HTML would prevent us meeting deadlines.

            We own radio and publishing properties around the US and Europe. Foundation allows us to iterate quickly and get short term and long term projects out the door.

            We actually use almost every product Zurb offers. The email templates are great.

            1 point
            • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

              Sweet! Love to chat more about this in the future. Feel free to hit me up on twitter if you've got it @brandon_arnold

              1 point
  • Siddig Zeidan, 9 years ago

    I realise that you said its only for Web Applications at the moment, but do you think that the next foundation for sites will have an option to use Flexbox also instead of Columns and rows?

    0 points
  • Dwayne CharringtonDwayne Charrington, 9 years ago

    As a Front End Web Developer myself, seeing the push for Flexbox pleases me. Sadly, I think Flexbox is still a while off being a viable replacement for the usual row/column format we are all accustomed too, but it will eventually happen. For those of us that don't have to support Internet Explorer versions less than ten, a Flexbox based grid makes so much sense (that's what Flexbox was created for). I sadly still have to support IE8 here (in a minimal capacity), so it'll be a while before I can use a Flexbox grid at work, but personal/freelance projects I would definitely be all over that.

    I've used Flexbox rather minimally, but I understand its power and it excites me. For anyone who has created a Masonry layout before and tried to use CSS only to discover you need a Javascript library, Flexbox will impress you. For anyone who has had to create fullscreen vertical single page scrolling websites, Flexbox will impress you as well (no display:table or Javascript hacks required) and the big one: horizontal layouts.

    As you can tell I am rather excited about Flexbox and it makes me happy to see others out there share the same excitement and enthusiasm for Flexbox as well. Here's to the future. Good job Zurb, I'll be keeping my eyes on you.

    0 points
    • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

      Thanks, Dwayne, We're def seeing a lot of oddities with Flexbox, but all in all it requires a little reframing of how you want to write code. Lot's more reliant on the parent rather than the child element.

      1 point
      • Dwayne CharringtonDwayne Charrington, 9 years ago

        Flexbox is an absolute mess at the moment, I tip my hat off to everyone over there at Zurb tackling this, haha. It's not like box-sizing which merely has the vendor prefixes, the syntax varies for different browsers, the supported values are different depending on browser and if you're supporting the 2012 spec syntax.

        If you're using the Flexbox branch on your Github, I will gladly contribute where I can to the Flexbox aspect of Foundation. Undeniably one of the most powerful CSS libraries around and I would like to help by contributing back.

        Is this the Flexbox branch that is being used or are there things being developed on a more private internal branch for the moment? https://github.com/zurb/foundation/tree/5-flexbox/

        0 points
  • James FryerJames Fryer, 9 years ago

    Go Zurb! These guys are always ahead of the curb. Maybe I've missed something here but have they mentioned how this will degrade to older browsers?

    0 points
    • Brandon ArnoldBrandon Arnold, 9 years ago

      It will degrade like any use of flexbox, but there are tons of pollyfills out there for your older browsers.

      0 points
      • James FryerJames Fryer, 9 years ago

        Cheers. Really looking forward to the day when this is the standard rather than the bleeding edge

        0 points