ie9 support? re: flexbox

[jensimmons]

I'm about to re-implement the pillar page layout using Flexbox instead of the current floats. Trying to set the height of these boxes to a fixed amount to work across a variety of widths with different content is a crazy fox chase that I'd rather not start. Flexbox will be faster than writing a bunch of tweaks to the height across a dozen of media queries (what I've done in the past for situations like this) — and it will result in a much better layout.

I'm thinking of implement Chris Coyier's mix of old and new flex box syntax to cover most browsers: http://css-tricks.com/using-flexbox/

The only holdout with that technique is IE9. We aren't supporting IE 6,7,8, right? Do we need to worry about IE9? I can easily add a conditional class on the html element and move the current layout CSS into an IE9-only stylesheet (with giantly-tall heights on each box). Or we can leave this page with no layout for the seven ie9 users. People will still see the content, it'll just be in a tall, thin single column.

Thoughts @ebidel ?

[ebidel]

There's some normalization already built into the flexbox mixins: https://github.com/GoogleChrome/developer.chrome.com/blob/master/static/sass/_mixins.scss#L30

The fatnav and homepage use flexbox all over the place and Google also announced dropping IE9 support now that 11 is out. IMO, we shouldn't worry about IE9 :) Our analytics for the current site also confirms this.

[jensimmons]

Oh nice. I debated adding a flex box mixin, but then didn't because I figured there'd be an argument against adding more code / something so "cutting edge". Ha! Didn't even think to look to see if it were already there. I've been writing code for too many luddites. I'll use that.