Day 01: Using percentages & avoiding heights

Percentages Vs Fixed widths

In this blog, let's see how effective percentage units are, while building a responsive website.

By default, things are responsive.

Unless and until we don't assign a fixed width to any element our website is responsive. Whenever we try to create layouts for website, we create a problem by taking the responsiveness away. Then, we try to solve this problem that we have created by defining media queries for different screen sizes.

So, how can we fix this problem?

As said earlier, "By default, things are responsive", which means that every element has a width of 100% of its parent. So, irrespective of the screen size, it is always 100% of viewport.
Hence, we can make our life easier and pretty simple by giving width in terms of % values instead of a fixed value.

Percentages on the child.

<body>
    <div class="parent">
        <div class="child">
            Lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet consectetur adipisicing elit. 
            Nesciunt nam ullam quo incidunt rerum corporis reprehenderit blanditiis natus quae consequatur,    
            possimus, dolores, mollitia a quis temporibus eos ut similique cupiditate!
        </div>
    </div>
</body>

When you give the parent, width:80% and the child width:50%, what does it actually mean?

.parent{
     width:80%;
     }

.child{
    width:50%;
    }

The parent class would have 80% width of its parent (ie) body and the child class would have 50% width of its parent (ie) 50% of the 80% given to the parent class.

The bigger the parent gets, the bigger the child gets.
The smaller the child gets, the smaller the child gets.
It's always the relation between them.

Why it's a good idea to avoid heights?

Whenever you give a fixed height to an element, when the screen gets smaller the content of the element overflows the parent.

But when you want the element to take up a certain height, give padding around the element instead of the fixed value of height so that it becomes responsive.