Flexie

Legacy support for the CSS3 Flexible Box Model.

Version

0.9

See it in Action?

Flexie Playground

Ready For Prime Time?

...Possibly.

Browser Support

• IE 6-9
• Opera 10.0+

The Flexible Box Model is supported natively by these browsers:

• Firefox 3.0+
• Safari 3.2+
• Chrome 5.0+

In addition, Flexie attempts to normailze browser inconsistencies with the flexible box model.

Currently Supported Properties

• box-orient
• box-align
• box-direction
• box-pack
• box-flex
• box-flex-group
• box-ordinal-group

Not There Yet

• box-lines (as far as I can tell, no browser currently supports this property)

Why?

I really wanted to use the CSS3 Flexible Box Model.

How?

It works like Selectivizr. In fact, it uses Selectivizr's engine to traverse your style sheets and looks for display: box elements. After that, it looks for any of the currently supported properties.

Note: Flexie looks for non-namespaced properties. For example, it will ignore -moz-box-pack, but not box-pack. For best results, make sure to use a non-namespaced property. But you were already doing that to future-proof your code, weren't you?

No setup on your end, just stick Flexie in your markup after your selector engine of choice.

Requirements

See the Things you need to know

Caveats

As of FF 4.0 / Chrome 7 / Safari 5, Gecko and Webkit differ slightly in their flexbox implementations. Of note is their default values. Webkit will default to box-align: start, while Gecko defaults to the spec-defined box-align: stretch. Make sure your flexbox CSS works on both these browsers before adding Flexie.

• As of version 0.7, Flexie normalizes the box-align property across Webkit browsers.
• As of version 0.8, Flexie normalizes the box-pack property in Gecko.

Be careful of pseudo-selectors (i.e., :nth-child, :first-child). While native flexbox does not modify the DOM, Flexie must. Thus, your CSS properties might not apply as intended. For example, if you use a combination of box-direction: reverse and a :first-child selector, that selector will target the wrong element. And if you followed all of that, congratulations.

Acknowledgements

Selectivizr, for their fantastic CSS parsing engine.

Copyright and Software License

The MIT License

Copyright (c) 2010 Richard Herrera

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Contact

• rich {at} doctyper {dot} com
• @doctyper on Twitter
• http://doctyper.com

Links

• Flexie on GitHub: http://github.com/doctyper/flexie