Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

What's with all these articles about CSS grid within a few days? I feel like someone who really doesn't like Bootstrap is paying for people to insist that CSS grid is ready for production.

Look at this: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid

78.08% global usage, and that's if you use autoprefixing.

That's just pathetic. I'm as much a fan of CSS grid as the next person, but no way I'm going to build a site or an app with it only to have my boss yell at me because ~20% of the audience says the design looks like garbage or doesn't work.

View on HN

You don't need to worry about UC browser if you aren't in China (that knocks several other browsers > 1% "global" share too). Opera Mini + IE11 is ~5.5% unsupported.

One recommendation from the video the other day was also very good in this regard: https://youtu.be/7kVeCqQCxlk?t=23m45s

Create something that works on mobile, then use grid to build outwards. Then you get reasonable views on unsupported platforms (the mobile-centric view, and most platforms that don't support grid are Mobile) and grid works where it can / needs to.

IE11 will -never- support grid. Don't let that hold you back! (Unless you're specifically developing for an IE11-rich market)

very few people aren't in china. all projects i received lately test their site from china and want to expand there

That really seems like the billion+ dollar long tail. Either way, the mobile-first with grid on top strategy works out there.

Sometimes I wonder if 80% of CSS-related snark is coming by way of not understanding media queries.

Most North American, South American, European and African small businesses have zero business relationships when it comes to selling into China. EU exports to China, for example, are a mere ~$210b - with zero growth for several years - vs the $17t size of the EU economy. That's about 1/3 smaller than the size of Canadian imports from the US.

So it very much depends on your use case, as always. Mostly what China is looking to do is export and acquire, they've shown a very low interest in importing in any broad sense. Most businesses around the world will never have meaningful access to selling into China, unless their economic approach radically changes.

Speaking from Germany point of view, lots of companies do care about specific browser versions, some of them are only now transitioning to IE 11 on their minimum requirements RFPs.

That is until your boss's boss from up above complains that the web app you've built for them isn't working on their Windows 7 computer. I would normally agree with quickly dropping support for the old web, but then I'm forced to balance that with the dirtiness of mobile/feature detection for CSS, in which case I would choose to use the CSS that will just work for the situation at hand.

1) IE11 correctly handles `@support (display: grid) {}` (in that it recognizes it does not support it, because IE11's spec-inconsistent implementation is prefixed), which means CSS feature detection for grid works and is easy.

2) IE11 has an -ms- prefixed implementation of grid, it's just somewhat inconsistent with the final spec. That said, it's also rather feature complete comparatively, so if you must support IE11, and must give it grids, there is an option to use IE11's native grids as a terrible fallback.

3) Windows 7's extended support ends January 2020. There is less than two years left of security patches left for Windows 7. If your company isn't already planning to migrate to something more recent than Windows 7, time is ticking.

There is a saving grace here, which is that almost nobody who would ship a new grid-based design today is shipping only one layout. They're shipping a family of layouts for different devices.

And once you have a family of layouts, it's not a big deal to add one more layout that covers non-grid-capable browsers.

The design choice that makes this all tenable is to accept that the site isn't supposed to look identical across every browser. You're accepting that you'll do progressive enhancement of layout. Old browsers still get all the content, they will just get it in a more boring format (like all stacked into a single column).

If everyone waited for 100% availability, then 100% availability would never come.

But 80% availability is also pretty weak. Especially for CSS stuff where fallbacks are usually hard or impossible to implement cleanly.

This isn't javascript where you can just throw a polyfill (and even there, you're usually trading in multiple kilobytes of polyfills for a random feature you could easily have worked around.)

80% availability is pretty much the norm in web dev, historically speaking.

Once you need to support IE11 and have designers/QA that want the product to look as designed, it is not possible to use a less sophisticated layout for non-supporting browsers only.

Instead, the layout implemented so that it works in all common browsers including IE11, and I don't need CSS grid anyway (I'm not implementing the layout twice, with all the potential bugs that can happen)

Not to mention the extra overhead of supporting two forms of layout for the purpose of implementing a developer convenience, the point of which is defeated by having a fallback. (lolwut)

78% is not pathetic. All major desktop browser versions support it. It's only a ~4% different prefixed vs not. For where it fails, use flexbox and css as fallbacks. The time I've saved using grid and having to deal with fallbacks far outweighs the thought and effort I'd have to put into the same layout otherwise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com