CSS grid layout

In Cascading Style Sheets, CSS grid layout or CSS grid creates complex responsive web design grid layouts more easily and consistently across browsers. Historically, there have been other methods for controlling web page layout methods, such as tables, floats, and more recently, CSS Flexible Box Layout. CSS grid is currently not an official standard although it has been adopted by the recent versions of all current major browsers.

Motivation

CSS grid can create more robust and flexible layouts than the previous options like CSS floats. It also allows for more standardized code that works across browsers. This is in contrast to relying on specific browser hacks or complicated workarounds.
One issue with exploiting floats in CSS is that if content gets added to one portion of the page it could disrupt the flow of the page and break the layout. This is due to the varying heights for layout elements. Though flexbox supports flexible layouts and provides the flexibility of creating complex layouts, it fails when the need for creating responsive layouts in 2-dimensional space arises.

History

The first comprehensive draft of a grid layout for CSS was created by Phil Cupp, Markus Mielke and Alex Mogilevsky at Microsoft in 2011 and implemented in Internet Explorer 10 behind a -ms- vendor prefix. The syntax was restructured and further refined through several iterations in the CSS Working Group, led primarily by Elika Etemad and Tab Atkins Jr. The feature was widely adopted by web developers after evangelism led primarily by Rachel Andrew and Jen Simmons.

Browser support

As of October 2017, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge all support CSS grid without vendor prefixes. IE 10 and 11 support CSS grid but with an outdated specification. On mobile, all modern browsers support CSS grid except for Opera Mini. Web developers targeting older browsers can utilize Modernizr 3.5.0 to detect and gracefully degrade the webpage as needed.

Utilization in frameworks

Tailwind CSS incorporates CSS grid into its utilities for controlling how elements are sized and placed. However many other current web frameworks do not incorporate CSS grid, such as Bootstrap 4 and Foundation 6.

The fr unit

The "fr" unit is often used with CSS grid layout.
The "fr" unit, part of the CSS grid layout specification, represents a fraction of the leftover space in the grid container.

Examples

"Holy grail" layout

The following is an example of the "holy grail" layout:

HTML	The header The footer The left panel The main content area The right panel
Output

Table of values

The following is an example of a table of values:

HTML	Header1 Header2 Header3 value11 value12 value13 value21 value22 value23 value31 value32 value33 value41 value42 value43 value51 value52 value53 value61 value62 value63 value71 value72 value73
Output