Yash Kadam

Jan 26, 2022

Next.js is the Future of Web

You get a nice-looking design handed to you and it has this nice big hero section, followed by one of those three-up columns right beneath it. You know, like almost every other website you’ve ever worked on.

In other words, we get some block-level elements shrinking down and slotting next to one another. It feels like flex wants things to be as small as possible. But in reality, flexbox actually wants things to be as big as possible.

Wait, what? Flex shrinks things by default — that can’t be right! Right?

As awesome as flexbox is, what it’s doing under the hood is actually a little strange because, by default, it is doing two things at once. It first looks at the content size which is what we would get if by declaring width: max-content on an element. But on top of that, flex-shrink is also doing some work allowing the items to be smaller, but only if needed.

To really understand what’s going on, let’s break those two down and see how they work together.