Let's serve everyone good-looking content

In Benjamin’s poll, the second most voted reason to avoid Grid Layout was supporting Internet Explorer users. I think it all depends on how we want to support users. Of any browser. Warning: opinions ahead.

What lack of Grid Layout means

Let’s look at what a browser that does not support Grid Layout actually means.

What it is not

To be very clear, let’s all agree this is not the case:

• Browsers that support Grid Layout: users see a great layout
• Browsers that don’t support Grid Layout: users see a blank page

That would be bad. Luckily, it is not that bad. CSS comes with a cascade, which includes the mechanism that the values of style rules are always set to something. Rules have a default value, which is usually what browsers will apply for you. It can be overridden by a website’s stylesheet, which in turn can also be overridden by user stylesheets. Because of the design of CSS, properties always compute to some value.

What it is

When turning an element on the page into a grid, we apply display: grid to it. At that point, it becomes a grid container and we can apply grid properties to it (and its children). If we set display: grid in an unsupported browser, the element will simply not become a grid container, and it will not get any of the grid properties you set applied. The display property will be whatever it was, usually inline or block, different elements have different defaults.

A little sideline: per spec, if you use floats (or clear), they will be ignored on children of grid containers. This is great for fallbacks.

Without Grid Layout, you still get your content, typography, imagery, colours, shadows, all of that. It will likely be displayed in a linear fashion, so it will be more or less like most mobile views. That is a perfectly ok starting point and it is good-looking content that we can serve to everyone.

Serving users good-looking content

I think our goal, rather than supporting specific browsers or specific CSS properties, should always be this: to serve users good-looking content and usable interfaces that are on-brand. I think good-looking and usable do not depend on how griddy your layout is. On-brand might, though. Some brand design guidelines come with specific grids that content needs to be layed out in. But aren’t we already used to stretching such guidelines, building responsive interfaces that work across viewports? Shouldn’t we let go, because we cannot control a user’s browser?

If for some small proportion of our users, we let go of the specific grid we created with grid layout, that will not hurt them. Likely not without any fallback, but definitely not with a simple fallback based on floats, inline-block or maybe flex and/or feature queries. But keep it simple. As Jeremy Keith wrote:

You could jump through hoops to try to get your grid layout working in IE11, […] but at that point, the amount of effort you’re putting in negates the time-saving benefits of using CSS grid in the first place.

I don’t think we owe it to any users to make it all exactly the same. Therefore we can get away with keeping fallbacks very simple. My hypothesis: users don’t mind, they’ve come for the content.

If users don’t mind, that leaves us with team members, bosses and clients. In my ideal world we should convince each other, and with that I mean visual designers, product owners, brand people, developers, that it is ok for our lay-out not to look the same everywhere. Because serving good-looking content everywhere is more important than same grids everywhere. We already do this across devices of different sizes. For responsive design, we’ve already accepted this inevitability. This whole thing is a communication issue, more than a technical issue.

Save costs and sanity

If we succeed in the communication part, we can spend less time on fallbacks, now and in the future (I’m not saying no time, we want good-looking content). An example: that mixin we created to automatically fallback grid to flex to inline-block might look like a great piece of engineering now, it may later become a piece of hard to comprehend code. Solving the communication issue instead of the technical one, will save time in initial development costs and help prevent technical debt.