I recently discovered StackLayout, which is a flexible width, component based CSS layout system that looked pretty neat. It’s not your typical CSS grid system, in fact that’s not really what it is at all, so wanting to learn more than the website shared with us I tracked down Campbell McGuiness (@camslizzle) on Skype and asked him tell me all about it.

Original Thought

Campbell states that there are two things he dislikes about existing CSS grid systems:

1. An excessive number of non-sematic layout-specific classes are often required to acheive a desired layout. (More on StackLayout class names)
2. The float property does not have very intuitive behaviour, but is still used as the primary layout tool

And two things he likes about inline-block components:

1. They behave like text and don’t require clearfix elements to create rows
2. You can vertically align them

StackLayout is clearly his attempt to unify those two schools of thought. I happen to think he’s done it fairly well IMHO.

Background

Mostly StackLayout was born out of Campbell’s own needs while being a front-end developer/designer at Working Software. Solving his own production needs in the way he wanted to drove the nature of what’s behind StackLayout.

The component nature of StackLayout is also directly related to his experience working with content management systems, and in particular the creation of a new content management system he’s been working on releasing.

He really gets into it in the video.

If there’s one thing I took away from talking with Campbell was his insight into how he’s selling the framework. We discussed documentation and noted how difficult it is to create good documentation. Campbell answered with “if I just make it easy to use, it’ll sell itself” – that’s so true. He’s not “selling” anything really, he just wants more people to use his framework so it can grow and evolve more, but making something easier, especially when it comes to open source projects like this is paramount to their success. Good stuff Campbell!

Who?

Campbell McGuiness (@camslizzle) is a member of the Working Software team and has a passion for hand coding highly semantic, cross browser & device compatible HTML & CSS.