CSS fluid columns, fixed margins; the holy grail of holy grails

Question

Update & Summary

I feel obligated to make this question clearer, now that there is a bounty attached.

(Also, I\'m pretty sure this will be child\'s

Answer 1

I finally figured out. After into the hundreds of hours wasted on and off over the last decade (though I'm relying on some css that wouldn't have worked year ago anyway). I solved it without any gotchas. and in IE8+.

Please prepare the 2001: A Space Odyssey Music because I'm landing this boat.

The genius and trick to this method is in using inline-block elements and then using word-spacing to counterbalance using a negative right margin. A negative right margin on it's own will pull elements together, allowing you to have 100% width set and still fit things in between, but leave the elements overlapping. Setting negative margin on the parent just undoes the child margin in regards to the effect on interacting with total width (the magic "100% width" mark we're trying to hit"). Padding only serves to increase the size of the element its on and is useless with regards to counter-acting margin. It is often used with box-sizing in the jury rigged solutions to this problem, at the expense of losing the ability to use padding at all otherwise (and margin) and likely requiring more wrapper elements.

word-spacing provides the magical "third way" to add or remove horizontal distance between two elements, provided they are inline-block, since they will be counted as a single "word" in that case, and any whitespace between will collpapse down to the one single controllable "word-spacing" property. Aside from this trick I'm not aware of another way to get this 100% result.

I humbly present the ultimate answer to the fixed-gutters flex-columns problem. I hereby name my solution "the omega maneuver". It comes with the ability to handle arbitrary mixed width columns (adding up to 100% total width exactly or slightly less for rounding), any gutter size, any predefined amount of columns in width, handles arbitrary amounts of rows with auto-wrapping, and uses inline-block elements so therefore provides the vertical-alignment options that come with inline-block, AND it doesn't require any extra markup and only requires a single class declaration on the container (not counting defining column widths). I think the code speaks for itself. Here's the code implementation for 2-6 columns using 10px gutters and bonus helper classes for percentages.

EDIT: interesting conundrum. I've managed to get two slightly different versions; one for mozilla and ie8+, the other for webkit. It seems the word-spacing trick doesn't work in webkit, and I don't know why the other version works in webkit but not ie8+/mozilla. Combining both gets you coverage over everything and I'm willing to bet there's a way to unify this tactic or something very similar to work around the issue.

EDIT2: Mostly got it! Magical text-align: justify gets WebKit almost there with the word-spacing one. The spacing just seems a tiny bit off, like a matter of pixels on the right and maybe one extra in the gutters. But it's usable and it seems more reliable about keeping the columns than anything I've used before. It never chops down to fewer columns, it'll compress until the browser gets a horizontal scrollbar.

Edit3: Got it a little close to perfect. Setting the font-size to 0 normalizes most of the remaining issues with spacing that's off. Just gotta fix IE9 now which collapses it if it font is size 0.

EDIT4: Got the answer to IE from some other fluid width posts: -ms-text-justify: distribute-all-lines. Tested in IE8-10.

/* The Omega Maneuver */
[class*=cols] { text-align: justify; padding-left: 10px; font-size: 0;
             -ms-text-justify: distribute-all-lines; } 

 [class*=cols]>* { display: inline-block; text-align: left; font-size: 13px;
                word-spacing: normal; vertical-align: top;
                -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
                   -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
                        box-sizing: border-box; }

.cols2 { word-spacing: 20px; padding-right: 20px; }
.cols3 { word-spacing: 30px; padding-right: 30px; }
.cols4 { word-spacing: 40px; padding-right: 40px; }
.cols5 { word-spacing: 50px; padding-right: 50px; }
.cols6 { word-spacing: 60px; padding-right: 60px; }

  .cols2 > * { margin-right: -10px; }
  .cols3 > * { margin-right: -20px; }
  .cols4 > * { margin-right: -30px; }
  .cols5 > * { margin-right: -40px; }
  .cols6 > * { margin-right: -50px; }

Some helpers:

.⅛, .⅛s >* { width: 12.50%; }
.⅙, .⅙s >* { width: 16.66%; }
.⅕, .⅕s >* { width: 20.00%; }
.¼, .¼s >* { width: 25.00%; }
.⅓, .⅓s >* { width: 33.00%; }
.⅜, .⅜s >* { width: 37.50%; }
.⅖, .⅖s >* { width: 40.00%; }
.½, .½s >* { width: 50.00%; }
.⅗, .⅗s >* { width: 60.00%; }
.⅝, .⅝s >* { width: 62.50%; }
.⅔, .⅔s >* { width: 66.00%; }
.¾, .¾s >* { width: 75.00%; }
.⅘, .⅘s >* { width: 80.00%; }
.⅚, .⅚s >* { width: 83.33%; }
.⅞, .⅞s >* { width: 87.50%; }
.blarg-five-twelfs { width: 41.66%; }

You can witness my magnum opus in action amongst a field of glory here: http://jsfiddle.net/xg7nB/15/

<div class="cols4">
    <div class="⅙">This is my magnum opus</div>
    <div class="¼">I finally beat css</div>
    <div class="⅙">⚉ ☺ ☻ ♾ ☢</div>
    <div class="blarg-five-twelfs">I BEAT IT FOREVER</div>
</div>

The absolute minimal implementation, using as an example 4 equal width (25%) width cols and 10px gutters is like so:

.fourEqualCols { word-spacing: 40px; padding: 0 40px 0 10px;
                 text-align: justify; font-size: 0;
                 -ms-text-justify: distribute-all-lines; }

.fourEqualCols>* { margin-right: -30px; width: 25%;
                   display: inline-block; word-spacing: normal;
                   text-align: left; font-size: 13px; }


<div class="fourEqualCols ">
  <div>GLORIOUSLY CLEAN MARKUP</div>
  <div>I hate extra markup and excessive class props</div>
  <div>Naked code</div>
  <div>get intimate</div>
</div>

Soooo this code essentially replaces pretty much any existing grid framework right? If you can arbitrarily set gutters and then just make sets of columns that hit 100% width, that's strictly superior to most/all grid frameworks in fact isn't it? If you're not developing for IE7 anymore like a lot of us then that combined with box-sizing: border-box renders padding and border also a non-issue.

Edit: oh right you wanted to be flush with the sides of the container. No problem with this, I had to specifically add side gutters so we can just change some values by 10 and get rid of the padding and voila. http://jsfiddle.net/bTty3/

[class^=cols] { text-align: justify; font-size: 0;
             -ms-text-justify: distribute-all-lines; } 

 [class^=cols] >* { display: inline-block; text-align: left; font-size: 13px;
                word-spacing: normal; vertical-align: top;
                -webkit-box-sizing: border-box;
                   -moz-box-sizing: border-box;
                        box-sizing: border-box; }

.cols2 { word-spacing: 20px; padding-right: 10px; }
.cols3 { word-spacing: 30px; padding-right: 20px; }
.cols4 { word-spacing: 40px; padding-right: 30px; }
.cols5 { word-spacing: 50px; padding-right: 40px; }
.cols6 { word-spacing: 60px; padding-right: 50px; }
 .cols2 >* { margin-right: 0 }
 .cols2 >* { margin-right: -10px; }
 .cols3 >* { margin-right: -20px; }
 .cols4 >* { margin-right: -30px; }
 .cols5 >* { margin-right: -40px; }
 .cols6 >* { margin-right: -50px; }

Same html

<div class="cols4">
    <div class="⅙">This is my magnum opus</div>
    <div class="¼">I finally beat css</div>
    <div class="⅙">⚉ ☺ ☻ ♾ ☢</div>
    <div class="blarg-five-twelfs">I BEAT IT FOREVER</div>
</div>

Answer 2

Why not using the padding like in your first example and then set box-sizing: border-box on all elements?

Answer 3

Why don't you use

.column > .panel {
    padding: 10px 0 10px 10px;
}

.column:first-child > .panel {
    padding-left: 0px;
}

It will make 10px spaces only between boxes and without using last-child.

Answer 4

If you can live with another nested div per column you could define the desired margin for each. To get rid of the margin on the left and right outer edges you can define a negative margin on the outer container.

E.g.: Using pureCSS pure-g is the outer container, pure-u-* is a column node (display: inline-block) containing the nested div. spacing is the name of this custom extension of the pureCSS grid system to allow column margins.

.pure-g.spacing {
    margin: 0 -10px;
}

.pure-g.spacing [class *= "pure-u"] > div {
    margin: 10px;
}

Should work on most browsers. Tell me if it doesn't - I am using it already.

regards, Max