Tag Archives: masonry

A Lightweight Masonry Solution

With Masonry being specced in Grid Layout Module Level 2 – and already being implemented in Firefox – Ana Tudor looked into whipping up a lightweight fallback for browsers that don’t support it.

🤔 Masonry Layout?

Masonry is a grid layout based on columns, as popularized by Pinterest. Unlike other grid layouts, it doesn’t have fixed height rows. It works by placing elements in optimal position based on available vertical space, sort of like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

It became easy to implement thanks to the Masonry JavaScript Library.

After first laying out all images in columns, she then calculates the vertical gaps between all items. Each gap is adjusted – using a negative top margin – so that the items shift upwards, after which them end up at their wanted positions.

A Lightweight Masonry Solution →

CSS Grid Layout Module Level 2: Masonry Layout

UPDATE 2020.10.22: Masonry Layout has officially become part of the CSS Grid Module Level 3 spec!

A long requested CSS feature is to be able to create a “Masonry Layout” using pure CSS. Today we can already create a Masonry-like layout using grid-auto-flow: dense;, but unfortunately that’s not the real deal.

🤔 Masonry Layout?

Masonry is a grid layout based on columns, as popularized by Pinterest. Unlike other grid layouts, it doesn’t have fixed height rows. It works by placing elements in optimal position based on available vertical space, sort of like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

It became easy to implement thanks to the Masonry JavaScript Library.

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Thankfully discussions to natively implement Masonry in CSS haven’t stopped and back in January it kinda settled on this syntax:

.masonry {
  display: grid;
  grid-gap: 1em;
  grid: masonry / repeat(auto-fit, minmax(20em, 1fr));
}

☝️ That’s grid-template-rows being set to masonry there, and grid-template-columns to the already familiar repeat(auto-fit, minmax(20em, 1fr))

Knowing that Tab Atkins – author of CSS Grid Layout Level 1 – responded with I’m liking this quite a bit! was a good sign. What’s even better is that Firefox Nightly (version 77a1) has implemented it by now, behind a flag.

👨‍🔬 Do note that this Masonry addition is still a proposal and is considered to be highly experimental at the time of writing. The syntax is still being discussed upon and is NOT final at all. Heck, you can’t even find a mention of Masonry in the CSS Grid Module Level 2 Draft!

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To enable the experimental Masonry implementation in Firefox Nightly go to about:config and set layout.css.grid-template-masonry-value.enabled to true.

Once enabled the following pen should show a nice Masonry Layout:

See the Pen CSS Masonry Layout (FF Nightly – Feature Flag) by Miriam Suzanne (@mirisuzanne) on CodePen.

Yes, I’m really excited about this one … let’s hope it sticks!

~

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