Look Ma, no floats! Image: Abobe

While it’s possible to create amazingly complex layouts using tools like CSS floats, positioning rules and the odd bit of JavaScript, none of those tools were actually created explicitly for laying out content, which is why it’s amazingly complex to get them working the way you want across browsers.

Soon, however, you’ll be able to throw out your floats and embrace a better way — the CSS Flexible Box Model, better known as simply Flexbox. Flexbox enables you to create complex layouts with only a few lines of code — no more floats and “clearfix” hacks.

Perhaps even more powerful — especially for those building responsive websites — the Flexbox order property allows you to create layouts completely independent of the HTML source order. Want the footer at the top of the page for some reason? No problem, just set your footer CSS to order: 1;. Flexbox also makes it possible to do vertical centering. Finally.

We’ve looked at Flexbox in the past, but, unfortunately the spec has undergone a serious re-write since then, which renders older code obsolete. If you’d like to get up to speed with the new syntax, the Adobe Developer Blog recently published a guide to working with Flexbox by developer Steven Bradley.

Bradley walks through the process of using Flexbox in both mobile and desktop layouts, rearranging source order and elements to get both layouts working with a fraction of the code it would take to do the same using floats and other, older layout tools. The best way to wrap your head around Flexbox is to see it in action, so be sure to follow the links to Bradley’s demo page using either Chrome, Opera or Firefox 20+.

For some it may still be too early to use Flexbox. Browser support is improving, but obviously older browsers will never support Flexbox, so bear that in mind. Opera 12 supports the new syntax, no prefix necessary. Chrome supports the new syntax, but needs the -webkit prefix. Like Opera, Firefox 20+ Firefox 22 supports the unprefixed version of the new spec. Prior to v22 (currently in the beta channel), Firefox supports the old syntax. IE 10 supports the older Flexbox syntax. Most mobile browsers support the older syntax, though that is starting to change. [Update: Mozilla developer Daniel Holbert, who is working on the Flexbox code in Firefox, wrote to let me know that the Flexbox support has been pushed back to Firefox 22. Actually the new Flexbox syntax is part of Firefox 20 and up, but until v22 arrives it's disabled by default. You can turn it on by heading to about:config and searching for layout.css.flexbox.enabled pref. Set it to true and the modern syntax will work.]

So, as of this writing, only two web browsers really support the new Flexbox syntax, though Firefox will make that three in the next month or so.

But there is a way to work around some of the issues. First off, check out Chris Coyier’s article on mixing the old and new syntaxes to get the widest possible browser support. Coyier’s methods will get your Flexbox layouts working in pretty much everything but IE 9 and below.

If you’re working on a personal site that might be okay — IE 9 and below would just get a simplified, linear layout. Or you could serve an extra stylesheet with some floats to older versions of IE (or use targeted CSS classes if you prefer). That defeats some of the benefits of Flexbox since you’ll be writing floats and the like for IE, but when usage drops off you can just dump that code and help move your site, and the web, forward.

Foundation 4. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

ZURB has released a major new version of its popular Foundation framework, a web development toolkit for quickly building responsive websites. The new Foundation v4 is a ground-up re-write that sees ZURB taking a mobile-first approach.

Like its erstwhile competitor Bootstrap, Foundation offers a set of HTML and CSS building blocks you can use to quickly develop basic site structure and design — layouts, typography, forms and other common design elements are all available.

There are three ways you can try out Foundation 4. You can download the straight compressed CSS and use that as a starting point for your own customizations. Alternately you can customize your build of Foundation, including only the elements you need; or you can install the SASS version of Foundation and customize it within your SASS code.

If you’re upgrading from Foundation 3 be sure to read through ZURB’s migration guide as the syntax for the grid and other elements has changed.

The real power of Foundation 4 doesn’t really come into play unless you go with the SASS option. Thanks to SASS’s “mixins” concept you can now use the grid tools in Foundation 4 without littering your HTML with the various (purely presentational) grid class names. Using Foundation 4 within your SASS project also makes it dead simple to use only the components you need, for example, you can include the grid mixins, but skip the typography if it’s not to your liking.

Be aware that the new mobile-first approach in Foundation 4 means browsers which don’t support media queries will only get very basic styling for the grid and other UI elements. Yes, that pretty much only affects IE 8. But, if your project needs more robust support for IE 8, there is a modified version of Foundation 4 with support for IE 8 (alternately, you could stick with Foundation 3).

It’s also worth noting that, because Foundation 4 is such a departure from the previous version, ZURB plans to continue supporting Foundation 3 for some time.

If you’ve got questions about Foundation 4, head on over to the official site and check out the documentation. You can also explore the code on GitHub — Foundation is one of the top 20 most-starred projects on the site.

Adobe’s proposed text-balance rule (right) versus no balancing (left). Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Adobe is continuing its effort to bring better typography to the web with a new proposal for what the company is calling “Automatic Text Balancing.” If browsers adopt text balancing it could mean the end of typographic unsightliness like widows, orphans and ragged lines, and would go a long way to creating more readable text on the web.

Adobe’s proposal is based on Adobe InDesign’s “Balance Ragged Lines” feature, and works a bit like justifying text except that instead of expanding text with ugly spaces between words, the algorithm would adjust line lengths to “balance” text for easier reading.

Adobe’s Randy Edmunds outlines the basic idea behind automatic text balancing on the company’s Web Platform Blog. Essentially text balancing would mean eliminating widows (single words pushed to a new line), and also automatically presenting text so that it’s even wrapped instead of a long line followed by a shorter line.

Here’s how Edmunds and Adobe see text balance working:

I propose we use a text rendering algorithm that would be applied by browser when asked by the designer to do so to automatically balance text across multiple lines, like so:

h1 {
  text-wrap: balance;
  }

This would make all h1 elements whenever they span more than one line to be automatically rendered such that they have balanced text. As you notice, I only propose an additional value to the existing text-wrap property of CSS.

If accepted by the W3C, Adobe’s text balance proposal would add a new balance value to the proposed CSS text-wrap rule. The text-wrap property was originally part of the CSS 3 spec, but has since been removed and remains in flux.

Adobe has already created a jQuery plugin polyfill that implements the proposed text balance algorithm. You can grab the code from GitHub. There’s also a sample page where you can see the jQuery text balancing in action. (Be sure to resize the window to see the reflow difference between balanced and unbalanced text.) There’s also an ongoing discussion on the CSS WG mailing list if you’d like to dig into the details.

Form Follows Function. Image: Screenshot.

If you’ve been missing the early days of HTML5, back when experimentation, not stolid, functional sites was the name of the game, we’ve got a site for you: Form Follows Function.

Form Follows Function is a collection of interactive experiments built using HTML5 elements like Canvas and CSS 3 tools like 2-D/3-D transforms. Experiments include growing trees with the click of the mouse (or touch of a finger, depending on your device), dragging waves and 3-D cans of Campbell’s soup. Even the rotating menu of the experiments is impressive.

The site is the brainchild of developer Jongmin Kim, whose design work has previously garnered a Webby award.

Fun thought experiment: Imagine taking this site back in time, showing it to your 2002 self and then pointing out that it’s all built with web standards, no Flash involved.

While we really like Form Follows Function it does fall prey to the main reason we don’t really miss the early days of HTML5 and CSS 3 all that much — it doesn’t use CSS prefixes properly. Form Follow Function optimizes for Firefox and Chrome while ignoring Opera and Internet Explorer; a shame, considering how well done the rest of the site is.

CSS custom filters in action. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

You can grab Chrome 24 — now tied with emacs in the great version number race — from Google. Current users should be updated the next time Chrome restarts.

The best news for web developers in this release is support for the draft CSS custom filters specification. First developed by Adobe, custom filters allow web developers to easily apply cinema-style filter effects to any HTML content. Think grayscale-to-color transitions, animated shadows, photo-realistic warping and other mainstays of the 3-D animation world.

Previously you needed Adobe’s special build of WebKit to work with custom filters, but now support is baked into Chrome. However, it’s still disabled by default so you’ll need to head to about:flags and search for “Enable CSS Shaders”. Click “Enable” and then relaunch Chrome. Once you’ve enabled custom filter support, head on over to Adobe’s demo page for some examples of what’s possible with custom filters.

Chrome 24 also offers a nominal speed bump thanks to some improvements in Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and, according to an earlier blog post, Chrome’s Cloud Printing feature is faster thanks to some server-side tweaks.

Some flexible foundations are better than others. Image: McPig/Flickr

If you’re using pixels as part of your responsive designs you’re probably making your life harder than it needs to be.

There’s nothing “wrong” with using pixels in an otherwise responsive layout, but if you do you’ll likely end up writing more code than you would using flexible units.

Jon Allsopp’s A Dao of Web Design predates responsive design by a decade, but its prescient advice remains perhaps the best way to approach any design, responsive or otherwise: “It is the nature of the web to be flexible, and it should be our role as designers and developers to embrace this flexibility, and produce pages which, by being flexible, are accessible to all.”

More than just embracing the nature of the medium, building your sites atop what developer Trent Walton calls “Flexible Foundations” can go a long way to making development easier. As Walton points out in his post, using pixels often means more code since pixel-based type, margins and padding mean you need to add new values at every responsive breakpoint.

“In many ways,” writes Walton, “every time we use a pixel value in CSS we’re rasterizing what was a fully-scalable web.”

Stick with percentages, ems or the newer rem units and your designs can scale simply by changing the body font size. Embracing the flexibility of the medium means you can adapt as well — no need to panic when a client wants to make the logo bigger at the last minute, you can scale the whole layout up (or down) with a few lines of code. For Walton’s design firm, Paravel, the flexible approach has already proved its worth in just this way:

This paid off a few weeks ago, when a client wanted to make significant changes to the layout for his site. Type, imagery, buttons, etc. needed to be smaller and overall width & spacing (margins / padding) needed to be reduced. Thankfully, this was as simple as adjusting the body font-size at wide views. Years ago, however, this could have set the project weeks beyond scoped timeline and budget.

As developer Brad Frost has said, “Get your content ready to go anywhere because it’s going to go everywhere.” Pixels may work today, but they make for a rigid site that might well break on new devices. As Walton concludes “the sites we’ve built to display on a desktop, smartphone, or a tablet today could be on a TV screen, coffee table display, or mega space yacht projection system tomorrow.” Start with a flexible foundation and your site should handle just about any hardware that tries to load it.

Social code hosting service GitHub isn’t just a free, easy way to host and share your code; it’s also a huge CSS and HTML testing ground with experience writing a fast, scalable code.

So what has GitHub learned from running a hugely successful site? That surprisingly small changes to both HTML and CSS can have a huge impact on performance.

GitHub’s Jon Rohan gave a talk about some of the service’s performance problems and solutions at the CSS Dev Conference in Honolulu earlier this year. (The slides are available on Speaker Deck.) The whole video is worth watching, but the key takeaway is that the right small changes in your code can have a huge impact on performance.

Many of Rohan’s suggestions for faster CSS will be familiar to anyone who’s used YSlow and other performance tools — get rid of unnecessary tag identifiers in your CSS, i.e., div.menu becomes just .menu, eliminate ancestors where possible and avoid chaining your CSS selectors.

On the HTML side — and Rohan says it’s here that GitHub really saw performance improvements — he suggests reducing the amount of matched HTML on the page. That is, look at your pages in a profiler, figure out which tags are being matched and look for ways to simplify the layout to avoid bottlenecks. Among the more depressing things Rohan presents is how much the page load times dropped with switching from anchor links to a JavaScript solution that, while faster, is considerably less accessible.

GitHub is undeniably different than most websites — especially pages like the Git diff views, which involve considerably more code than most pages will need. But, while GitHub may be the extreme example, in many cases the same small changes can help speed up much simpler pages as well.

CSS Blend Modes demo. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

We use the term “CSS 3″ all the time on Webmonkey, but technically that’s something of a misnomer. There is no spoon, you see.

In fact, the CSS Working Group, which oversees the CSS specification at the W3C, is cranking out draft specs of new features all the time — the monolithic “3.0″ or “4.0″ versioning was tossed out after CSS 2.1. Instead new features are developed as “modules” so that, for example, the Selector Module can be published without waiting for the Layout Module.

That means there are new CSS features coming all the time.

Adobe’s Divya Manian — who is also one of the developers behind HTML5 Boilerplate — recently gave a talk titled “CSS Next“, which highlights some of the exciting new CSS features coming soon to a browser near you.

Among the cool things Manian highlights are some impressive new tricks for web fonts, including better tools for working with ligatures, unicode and icon fonts.

There are also some impressive new layout tools in the works, namely CSS Regions and Exclusions. We looked at both back when Adobe first proposed them, but since then not only have they progressed to actual draft specs, but they’re now supported in Chrome’s Canary builds (rather than requiring a custom build from Adobe).

It’s still going to be a while before either can claim a spot in your CSS layout toolkit, but there are already a few demos you can check out to see the new layout possibilities Regions and Exclusions offer. Grab a copy of Chrome Canary and turn on “Enable Experimental WebKit Features” in chrome:flags and then point your browser to this demo of Regions and this “shape inside” demo of Exclusions.

Other things Manian covers that we’re looking forward to include CSS Filters and Blend modes. CSS Filters already work in WebKit browsers and allow you to apply effects like blur or grayscale to any HTML element. CSS Blend Modes work just like layer-blending modes in Photoshop and other graphics apps — allowing you to blend layers using modes like “difference,” “overlay,” “multiply” and so on. As of right now you still need a special build of Chromium to see Blend Modes in action.

Manian also covers two intriguing WebKit-only features that aren’t yet a part of any CSS spec, but could be one day. Be sure to read through Manian’s post for more info and a few other new things, including two Webmonkey has covered recently — CSS @supports and CSS Variables.