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Chrome 57 Arrives With CSS Grid Layout and API Improvements (venturebeat.com)
Google has launched Chrome 57 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. From a report on VentureBeat: Among the additions is CSS Grid Layout, API improvements, and other new features for developers. You can update to the latest version now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome. Chrome is arguably more than a browser: With over 1 billion users, it's a major platform that web developers have to consider. In fact, with Chrome's regular additions and changes, developers have to keep up to ensure they are taking advantage of everything available. Chrome 57 implements CSS Grid Layout, a two-dimensional grid-based layout system for responsive user interface design. Elements within the grid can be specified to span multiple columns or rows, plus they can also be named so that layout code is easier to understand. The goal is to give developers more granular control, especially as websites are increasingly accessed on various screen sizes, so they can slowly move away from complex code that is difficult to maintain.
not to mention the tons of software, video game launchers, etc., using Electron (though these changes won't be available that far downstream for a while I would think)
But is it compatible with Internet Explorer 6? W have to use IE6.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
CSS Grid Layout! I've been waiting for that to be adopted by browsers for what seems like forever. Props to Microsoft for that particular spec (I would also have been happy with the older Template Layout proposal, which is a weirder yet slightly more powerful way of doing the same thing). Hopefully Firefox will add support CSS grids soon too - from the progress on Bugzilla it looks like it might be right around the corner.
Remember 15-20 years ago when we had based layouts? And then they invented CSS because that was such a terrible idea. Then we spend 10 years trying inventing css grid systems (ie bootstrap's grid, 960, etc) to replicate what we used to do with tables until they just finally gave up and made CSS Grid and Flexbox? That was sure fun.
"In fact, with Chrome's regular additions and changes, developers have to keep up to ensure they are taking advantage of everything available. "
Uh, no. You don't. The page you developed yesterday (or in 2000) should display just the same if you did it right in the first place. If not it's the browsers fault, not yours for "not keeping up". It's a fucking web browser.
Web developers: You should be avoiding non-standard browser capabilities like the plague. Period.
And in Google's case, where they have a solid record of abandoning projects many people depend upon at the drop of a virtual hat, you're taking a significant risk if you hitch your cart to their projects
Chrome's non-standard bits can be reasonably described as the ActiveX of this particular time period.
As Dr. Frank N. Furter has said: "Do you want them to see you... LIKE THIS???"
If you really think these things are valuable and should be supported, the smart thing to do is to work to see them become standards, wait for the resulting standards to be supported by all the major players, and then use them.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
One thing I liked more about Chrome than IE is that it was closer to being standard. It didn't change every version and was almost always backwards compatible with previous versions.
This non-standard CSS Grid Layout, which, may be a great idea, is completely useless unless it is a standard used by all browsers.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
But then they decided to get rid of their Apps framework and only support extensions (unless you're on Chromebook...and that may go away too if they ever get Android Apps on Chromebook working right).
Now it is just a browser with some annoying security restrictions and a need for a ton of extensions. It isn't an app engine platform in the way it used to be, at least not until they figure out how to support PWAs on desktop.
Firefox is supporting the common extensions framework (though not very well) and PWAs on Android (though not very well - they don't support standalone/fullscreen yet, which is ridiculous), so Chrome's losing some of what made it a platform to target.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
I think you missed the point of the GP. It doesn't matter that Chrome is the defacto standard, browser specific extensions are a terrible idea. Period. I'm going to guess you're fairly young and don't remember the fiasco that IE6 was. It was the defacto standard of the time with a market share that makes Chromes current market share seem insignificant. They added their specific extensions and it threw the entire web into chaos. It took some 15 years to recover from. The shockwaves are still being felt to this day some 20 years later.
Learn from history, don't repeat it. Browser specific extensions seem like a good idea at the time, but help no one in the long run. It just causes compatibility nightmares for years.
Tables went out of style for content placement. If you have rows of data to present, a table layout works just as fine as it always have.
What's the difference between CSS grid layout and BootStrap's grid layout?
In case you didn't know, Chrome is the only main browser left that does not support colored fonts. Actually there are several proposed standards for colored fonts, and Chrome supports exactly none of them. The most promising standard is OpenType SVG. Edge fully supports this and Firefox supports it, too, although they forgot to implement the SVG compression.
Here is more information on this feature: https://helpx.adobe.com/typeki...
And here is an example (looks nicer on Firefox and Edge): https://people-mozilla.org/~jk...
Let's hope we will see this in the not too distant future.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
Yes, Safari has been the new InternetExplorer for a while. The finally fixed the IndexedDB issues, but it's still behind in many other parts. I really wish the would catch up, because you cannot ignore that market share of Apple customers who are too lazy to install Chrome.
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Do you earn money for the page you developed in 2000?
That'd be like The Walt Disney Company earning money for short films it produced in 1928. Or like Gershwin Enterprises earning money for a musical piece written in 1924.
Oh wait, those are still the case because of the three-generation copyright regime.
or web designers just tell Safari users to stop using that backward browser.
And switch to what? Every third-party web browser in the iOS App Store other than Opera Mini uses the same WebKit engine that Safari uses, with the same unsupported elements, attributes, and APIs. Should iOS users switch to Opera Mini, which is essentially Remote Desktop to a browser running on someone else's server? Or should they instead choose to forfeit access to all iTunes Store and App Store purchases?
You can turn off Flash, EME, and other proprietary technologies by building Chromium from source, as some GNU/Linux distributions do.
It's actually kind of the reverse. It's cute that you still don't understand that IE6 wasn't a problem. It added a tremendous amount of functionality that wasn't available before. The problem was how long it took to go from IE6 to IE7, how long it took the W3C to provide standards that people wanted, and the fact that Firefox, Opera, IE6 and Safari all implemented standards differently for a long time. I concede that IE took the longest to get their shit in order, but I don't think we'd be better off had IE not pushed forward ahead of standards.
Of course, things are a little different now because we aren't having a problem with the standards lagging so far behind desired capability. This whole thread is stupid because CSS Grids are standard.
If I can just reach out with my words and touch a butthole, just one, it will all be worth it.
Yeah, and 15 years ago Internet Explorer and ActiveX was the 'defacto standard'.
We all know how well that turned out. Anyone who isn't very new to computing, should know very well that things *will* change, and they will change *drastically*. HTTP and HTML has survived(ish) the test of time *precisely* because they are formal standards that are independent of a specific product and company.
Every single time people have tied themselves to a specific product du jour, they've been bitten very hard on the ass. Every. Single. Time.
It doesn't matter what W3C "standards" have been written. They're useless to most web users and developers until they've actually been implemented in Chrome.
This is the bit that compelled me to comment. The sorry state of web technology today is precisely because people like you think you're too good to follow something as archaic as "standards". You think you know better. The end result is *everything* is getting balkanized to hell, security is going down the toilet, and compatibility is turning into a bad joke.
Here's a truth bomb for you: You *arn't* as good as you think you are, and you *don't* know better.
Standards exist for a reason, and if you are unable to recognize that fact, then you have no business developing anything technology-related.
really fast. They're a nightmare to edit, support and debug. Tables are great for, well, tables. Lists of information. A grid layout is something else entirely. It's a UI construct you use to layout application controls. Sure, you can use tables for that, but with tables if you make one change the whole thing falls apart. If you ever used Swing or VB's layout tools this looks to be a step in that direction, which would rock.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
you can get a lot of functionality and improvements for 'free' as the libraries update. Stuff like bootstrap.js, jquery and angular. If that's too scary for you can you switch the libraries out on a test system and see how they perform first.
For any complex web app you're building it with libraries. No sane person does that much work on their own, just like no sane person writes their own browser just run their own web apps on.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
This is a joke, right?