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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

The "fallback to flexbox" part makes me feel like a dinosaur. It wasn't that long ago when we were falling back to tables and floats...

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Indeed. But it's worth pointing out "falling back" to flexbox isn't a solid backup plan-- most versions supporting flexbox also support grid, or are evergreen.

https://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox https://caniuse.com/#search=grid

Sounds to me like this would be useful for React Native, where only flexbox-based layout is supported.

I doubt it - React Native's implementation of flexbox is different enough to make it very difficult to produce the same layout using the same out.

It's almost like an uncanny valley effect - its similar enough to lure you into a false sense of security, until you realise that defaults for flex-direction are reverse, or it implements flex/flex-grow/flex-shrink/flex-basis completely differently.

haha, yes.

I first used flexbox with RN and was kinda baffled when using it on the Web later

Assuming you can target browsers that support both, when does one pick flexbox over grids and vice versa? or does grids entirely replaces flexbox use case?

The community has been saying to use flexbox when you are only working with one axis, but I am not too sure that is true. Grid has adapted so many of flexbox’s rules, browser support seems to be the only differentiator.

I have a site in flexbox and planning to move it to grid to learn.

There are typical 1D places (stacks of divs, basically), so typical for flex. But since I can do the same with grid I wonder if I should use flex anywhere now (even for 1D).

Note: browser compatibility does not matter for this site

Flexbox for 1-dimensional layout, and Grid for 2-dimensional layout

This is the traditional answer but I wonder why. What does flex have that one cannot do with grid?

I guess if you really try, you can probably do all/most things flex can do with grid. However grid isn't really meant to have flexible responsive grid-cells, e.g. "how will the item1 grow in relation to item2 if we have additional space available?". Grid is more meant for scenarios where you wan't to completely change the layout of components of the site when you cross breakpoints, and when you have to do 2d gride-like layout (...duh!).

Truth. It was really just put into place for IE11. Hopefully usage rates will continue to shrink and PMs will let go of the requirement.

I just want to chime in and share that IE10 also supports flexbox (and thus this tool, I suppose)

You’re right, flexbox is not that old. It was just a requirement for a lot of our experiences that still support IE11.

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