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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Unless you need to support old browsers you can do all your columns and responsiveness work in Grid and Flexbox natively. Grid in particular is far better at layout than even the best framework (it has named areas, reflow options, all sorts of useful stuff). You no longer need a framework for any responsive layout. Consequently CSS frameworks should be becoming minimal on the layout stuff.

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Agreed. My last project I dumped a column system for just writing flexbox and grid CSS with vendor prefixing done by a post processor. It was very nice. I find most column systems only use 75% of flexbox, and miss some of the possible settings. Flexbox attributes are named very poorly though, and there was a learning curve on which attributes did what.

"No longer" as long as browser support is there? Are people polyfilling for grids or what?

Last time I checked, polyfills for flexbox sucked big time. Just did not work. Maybe the landscape has changed, as it often does in JS.

Given no decent flexbox polyfills, I would doubt the existence of a good grid polyfill. If we can't do flexbox, how do we cope with grid?

IE10 and IE11 support Grid, albeit a slightly different syntax to an older spec. CSS Grid is not new. IE support was there long before the other browsers. You don't need to write two entirely separate layouts to use Grid. You don't need a polyfill.

Jen Simmons made a really good video about exactly this topic - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7msERxu7ivg

Rachel Andrews' blog post about IE and Grid - https://www.rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2016/11/26/should-i-...

Mozilla article about progressive enhancement and Grid - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_La...

And then come mobile browsers.

Since when was IE10 the oldest and least standards compliant browser out there?

It isn't, but it is the oldest browser that still has enough market share to be worth supporting (in some limited circumstances). We're not discussing IE5.5 because it has effectively zero users.

I assume you know that I wasn't thinking of IE 5.5. Why not just say that you personally don't have to support anything below IE10 and so you didn't bother thinking about them?

For 99.99% of websites and apps Grid is ideal for layout. There might be things that still need to work in browsers that are too old to support it, but they're not useful when it comes to discussions about how to build websites.

Some web developers out there are still supporting ActiveX components that no one is willing to replace. I don't think anyone would advocate building a new site using ActiveX though. At some point we have to move forward and adopt new technologies that improve the way things are built. We're at a point in web dev where Grid is ready for mainstream use.

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