Flex Box article in .net magazine

Warning This article was written over six months ago, and may contain outdated information.

I’m very proud to have my second article published in .net magazine this month. It’s an introduction to the Flexible Box Layout module (Flex Box), which is currently implemented in Firefox and WebKit browsers and has made a tentative appearance in some of the platform previews of IE9 (although it was dropped for the Beta).

Update: The article is now available to read online: The CSS3 Flexible Box model explained.

The article was really hard to write, because I had to provide information about a whole new set of properties while providing a tutorial on how to use them. I ran to almost four pages in the magazine but still had to leave a few things out – hence this accompanying blog post.

The first thing I want to cover I actually found out about just days after I’d submitted the article, but too late to get it included. It’s called Flexie, and it’s a JavaScript shiv for Flex Box, which makes it work in non-supporting browsers. It works in combination with other JS libraries, so to run it with jQuery, for example, you just include this before the document </body>:

<script src="/path/to/jquery.min.js"></script>
<script src="/path/to/flexie.js"></script>

I’ve found it’s actually a little too buggy for me to consider using on a production website at the moment, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.

The other thing I didn’t have space to mention was about the differences in the Firefox implementation vs. the spec. I’m going to write that up in a longer blog post (and submit bug reports to the Firefox team). There are four issues I’ve discovered so far, although I’ve worked around them in the examples provided with the tutorial.

The magazine will be on sale this week (in all good newsagents), and I’d love to get feedback from anyone who reads it. I have to thank Paul Irish for sanity-checking the article before I submitted it, and for his helpful comments.

There was so much more to talk about that I wasn’t able to; but there will be a whole chapter on the subject in my book, which is due for release next February. And that’s the last self-promotion for a while, I promise.

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