Comments for Grid Layout

Hi all,

I recently attended a conference (Front-Trends) where one talk mentioned Grid Layout [1], among other things. Although authors were very interested in the functionality, there were a lot of complaints about the syntax both in the twitter backchannel and later in f2f discussions. I have to admit I agree with many of them. Here are a few:

1) Top complaint: The new syntax was universally considered unintuitive. It seems most authors think of grids in terms of rows and columns with rowspans and colspans, than with start and end.  Someone pointed out that this means twice as many changes if a column/row is added or removed.
2) They universally found it confusing that gutters are columns too [2] and expected an equivalent of multicol’s column-gap instead.
3) This is mine: In grid-template [3], I don’t understand why every string needs to have the same number of words. We could simply define that the number of columns is the max number of words and the rest are padded in some way, e.g. by repeating the last word (though there are better solutions).
4) Also, this has some good feedback and I haven’t seen Rachel posting it to the list: [4]

[1]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid
[2]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid/#repeat-notation
[3]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-grid/#grid-template-property
[4]: http://rachelandrew.co.uk/archives/2013/04/29/css-grid-layout-named-grid-lines-and-areas/

Lea Verou
W3C developer relations
http://w3.org/people/all#lea ✿ http://lea.verou.me ✿ @leaverou