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CSS CSS Flexbox Layout Flexbox Properties Wrapping Flex Items

Daniel Tkach
Daniel Tkach
7,608 Points

I'm not finding this amazing

Am I the only one who is not finding this amazing at all? The front-end web development course's been pretty boring so far. Some cool stuff sure but well... I think I'm like back-end better... so much fuss about having buttons align properly? wow... hahaha

Metin Saray
Metin Saray
2,387 Points

Then you're free to look at back-end tutorials. No need to troll here with unnecessary opinions.

4 Answers

Well, it depends a lot on where you're coming from and where you're going. I don't have an extensive background in any coding - I'm just half way through freecodecamp and I've done most of codecademy's courses. If you know a lot of the stuff already, I guess it's maybe beneath you, for me it's the first course I've seen get that far into CSS and design right from the start, which was nice.

But, ultimately, if things like aligning buttons properly don't interest you, and it's all about the pure programming, it probably is better to focus on the back end lol. That said, still skim the front end at least - a back end dev will still have to work with front end devs and designers in the workplace :)

But yeah, a front end developer just has to know that stuff, and think that way. If you're working for yourself, you're the designer, if you're employed the designer has to trust you to build what they tell you to.

Christopher Debove
PLUS
Christopher Debove
Courses Plus Student 18,373 Points

Like Jon Mirow said it, front-end is almost all for visual and UI.

You need to know that before flexboxes, vertically (specifically the vertical axis) aligning element was really a .pain in the ass (most of the time it was much of hacks).

Why ? Because HTML Documents weren't designed to be an "Application" and did not have a "full height". They were designed to be like newspaper pages, filling height as the content go. So positioning element or aligning them vertically was very tricky.

Flexboxes fix this matter in a set of at most 10 properties, that's the beauty of the thing.

Daniel Tkach
Daniel Tkach
7,608 Points

Thank you for the answers guys and I agree with you. I was thrown off when the instructor said "isn't this amazing?" Not it's not lol

As mentioned by Christopher, in the past a simple alignment was a pain. Flexbox allows you to use native CSS right out of the box as opposing having to use a framework like Bootstrap to managing your div sizing.

But, this is the beauty of Web Development, it's very diverse and allows a large spectrum of specialization.

You can think of it as building a car, some guys prefer to working on engineering the engine to tweak and tune performance. But some guys prefer to work on the look and feel of the car, and not worry about it's speed and handling.

Everyone is part of a team to deliver a product, its up to you what role you fit in on the team.

If you had been lucky enough to have a front-end web development job for a decade or more, then you'd understand the excitement. Before flexbox, layout alignment could be a headache for some developers because of the quirky behavior of inline-block and float elements. Your comments show me that you do not have much experience with front-end web development nor can you see the past the simple examples that the instructor has provided in this course. Treehouse is a learning environment and the comments section should be used a tool to further your understanding of the topic at hand. It's purpose isn't to express silly opinions about layout modules that have improved the way that professionals create digital products.