Welcome to Composing Layouts in React

Introduction

CSS in the Age of Components

What is Layout Composition? A React Layout Primitives Guide

Encapsulated CSS - How to Apply CSS in a Composable Way

Normal Document Flow in HTML, CSS, and React

CSS Grid vs Flexbox for Composable Layouts

How to Add a CSS Reset to Remove Default Browser Style

Composable Layouts

What are Layout Spacers?

How to Build a Stacked Component Layout in React

How to Build a Split Pane Layout in React

How to Build React Grid Layouts With Custom Column Numbers

How to Build a React Responsive Grid Layout

How to Build Responsive React Text Elements With InlineCluster

How to Add Inline Styling to React Components

Layout Primitives - The Spacers

Introduction to Layout Wrapper Primitives

How to Build a Pricing Page Widget in React With PadBox

Automatically Center Text DIVs with React Center Component

Resize Images And Maintain Aspect Ratio in React and CSS

How to Vertically Center a DIV in React With CSS

How to Build Accessible Navigation Divs in React

Layout Primitives - The Wrappers

Introduction to The Settings Pages

How to Build a React Navbar With a Menu and Header

How to Build a React Sidebar Menu

How to Build a Profile Settings Page in React

How to Build a Privacy Page with Toggle Buttons in React

Composing Layouts in Practice

CSS layout has grown and evolved into a robust set of tools to accomplish some fantastic modern layouts.
The problem is that we are still teaching CSS as something that is" hacked" together by using" tricks" to get our desired web layouts.
Learning CSS like this typically leads us down one of two paths: We either build fragile page layouts using 
the "see what sticks" method of CSS, or we give up and declare that CSS is too tricky and bring in an X column grid system like Twitter Bootstrap.

Creating page layouts in CSS doesn't have to be complicated. Like how you make much of your everyday speech using just a small 
subset of vocabulary composed together, you can achieve sophisticated layouts by composing simple low-level layout primitives in unique ways.

In this course, you will learn foundational layout primitives that you can use to build many of your more complex layouts. You will also learn 
how to apply the principle of "Encapsulated CSS" to both extend these primitives as well as to create custom layout primitives. To do this, we 
will recreate many of the layouts found in the wild using the principles mentioned above.

This course does not require extensive knowledge of CSS. It does assume that you have a basic understanding of the CSS box model, CSS specificity, 
CSS selectors, and CSS sizing units. Though you can apply the principles in this course to any modern web framework, including no framework 
development, this course will be using React and assume you have a basic understanding of React, JSX, and React hooks.

Composing Layout in React is for both novice and experienced developers who want to take their layout skills to the next level. This course will 
teach you the practical skills you need to build modern layouts for the web without depending on heavy CSS frameworks. Unlike courses and blog 
posts that teach each layout property in isolation, our product teaches practical layout patterns that you can use every day when solving your 
layout challenges.

In this course we show you how to build complex layouts in React by composing just a few foundational layout primitives.
Along the way you will learn modern CSS Layout tools like Normal Flow, Flexbox, and Grid.

Composing Layouts in React

What it means to compose layouts and why you should do it

How to apply the principles of Encapsualted CSS in our React components

The foundational layout primitives that every developer should know

Before adopting CSS, the styling of a web page was achieved primarily through the use of presentational tags. To change the font, alignment, color, or other visual properties, one had to compose the correct tags and attributes together. If you want to read an excellent summary of the early days of web layout, I would highly recommend checking out the 

These presentational tags were eventually dropped in favor of CSS for a few reasons, the biggest being the desire to separate content and presentation. HTML would therefore focus exclusively on providing semantic meaning to content, while CSS would focus on visual structure and styling. Interestingly enough, the one presentational tag that seemed to live long past its deprecation was the 

In this lesson, we will be creating a Center layout primitive that centers itself and its children.

In this lesson, we will be creating this Testimonial component:

The above component will need to have a max-inline-size of 

 and center itself in any parent container larger than that width. The component should also be able to center its children and text.

you can follow along by going to the codesandbox.io starter project

export default function Testimonial() {
  return (
    <div>
      <h2>Home4Hire</h2>
      <p>
        "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, nibh lorem convenire quo et. Usu ea libris
        omittantur. Dicta theophrastus ad mei. Dicat appetere at vis, qui ne
        scripta docendi."
      </p>
      <Attribution />
    </div>
  );
}

export const Center = styled.div`
  box-sizing: content-box;
  margin-inline-start: auto;
  margin-inline-end: auto;

  max-inline-size: 60ch;
`;

, but instead of being based on the physical properties of the screen, it is based on the writing mode.

Hopefully, when you saw that we were setting the inline margin and max-inline-size, you will have asked, "Hey, I thought setting the margin or size properties directly on a component was breaking the first rule of Encapsulated CSS?" And yes, you would be right. It does break the rule, but what we are doing in the above code still follows the "spirit" of the rule.

Let me explain. In this code, we are setting the 

. This means that any time we constrain the size, like with 

 level of the box model. In other words, setting the 

 is effectively setting the max-inline-size on its child.

---
title: Automatically Center Text DIVs with React Center Component
slug: center-component
description: In this lesson, we will be creating a Center layout primitive that centers itself and its children.
isPublicLesson: false
privateVideoUrl: https://fullstack.wistia.com/medias/5whvnnzjtn
useMdx: true
---

Before adopting CSS, the styling of a web page was achieved primarily through the use of presentational tags. To change the font, alignment, color, or other visual properties, one had to compose the correct tags and attributes together. If you want to read an excellent summary of the early days of web layout, I would highly recommend checking out the [web layout history](http://grid-layout.com/history.html) over at grid-layout.com.

These presentational tags were eventually dropped in favor of CSS for a few reasons, the biggest being the desire to separate content and presentation. HTML would therefore focus exclusively on providing semantic meaning to content, while CSS would focus on visual structure and styling. Interestingly enough, the one presentational tag that seemed to live long past its deprecation was the `center` tag. Google still used the `center` tag on its home page as late as 2020.

In this lesson, we will be creating a Center layout primitive that centers itself and its children.

## The problem: the Testimonial

In this lesson, we will be creating this Testimonial component:

![Testimonial red lines](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/composing-layouts-in-react/module_03/lesson_03.02/public/assets/center-red-line.png)

The above component will need to have a max-inline-size of `60ch` and center itself in any parent container larger than that width. The component should also be able to center its children and text.

## The solution

Like always, [you can follow along by going to the codesandbox.io starter project](https://codesandbox.io/s/the-testimonial-starter-c3uqs?file=/src/Testimonial.jsx).

Here is how our code starts out:

```jsx { actualFilename=./protected/center-0.js endLine=17 startLine=5 url=https&#x3A;//gitlab.com/fullstackio/books/composing-layouts-in-react/module_03/lesson_03.02/protected/center-0.js#L5 }
export default function Testimonial() {
  return (
    <div>
      <h2>Home4Hire</h2>
      <p>
        "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, nibh lorem convenire quo et. Usu ea libris
        omittantur. Dicta theophrastus ad mei. Dicat appetere at vis, qui ne
        scripta docendi."
      </p>
      <Attribution />
    </div>
  );
}
```

And this is how it looks:

![Testimonial step-0](https://d2uusema5elisf.cloudfront.net/courses/composing-layouts-in-react/module_03/lesson_03.02/public/assets/center-0.png)

First, let's build our Center primitive:

```jsx { actualFilename=./protected/center-1.js endLine=12 startLine=6 url=https&#x3A;//gitlab.com/fullstackio/books/composing-layouts-in-react/module_03/lesson_03.02/protected/center-1.js#L6 }
export const Center = styled.div`
  box-sizing: content-box;
  margin-inline-start: auto;
  margin-inline-end: auto;

  max-inline-size: 60ch;
`;
```

In the above code, we set the `box-sizing` to be `content-box`, the inline margin to be `auto`, and the `max-inline-size` to be `60ch`. You will remember from Module 1 that `max-inline-size` is the [CSS logical property variation](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Logical_Properties) of `max-width`, but instead of being based on the physical properties of the screen, it is based on the writing mode.

Hopefully, when you saw that we were setting the inline margin and max-inline-size, you will have asked, "Hey, I thought setting the margin or size properties directly on a component was breaking the first rule of Encapsulated CSS?" And yes, you would be right. It does break the rule, but what we are doing in the above code still follows the "spirit" of the rule.

Let me explain. In this code, we are setting the `box-sizing` property to be `content-box`. This means that any time we constrain the size, like with `max-inline-size`, we are only constraining it at the `content-box` level of the box model. In other words, setting the `max-inline-size` is effectively setting the max-inline-size on its child.

Learn

The newline Guide to Building Your First GraphQL Server with Node and TypeScript

Teach

Amelia Wattenberger

Author of Fullstack D3

Community

Composing Layouts in React

Module 1: Introduction

Introduction:

Start Here

Introduction: (2:30)

Welcome to Composing Layouts in React

Module 2: Composable Layouts

Lesson 1: (2:14)

CSS in the Age of Components

Lesson 2: (5:33)

What is Layout Composition? A React Layout Primitives Guide

Lesson 3: (8:53)

Encapsulated CSS - How to Apply CSS in a Composable Way

Lesson 4: (8:42)

Normal Document Flow in HTML, CSS, and React

Lesson 5: (6:27)

CSS Grid vs Flexbox for Composable Layouts

Lesson 6: (5:40)

How to Add a CSS Reset to Remove Default Browser Style

Module 3: Layout Primitives - The Spacers

Lesson 1: (2:02)

What are Layout Spacers?

Lesson 2: (17:07)

How to Build a Stacked Component Layout in React

Lesson 3: (14:21)

How to Build a Split Pane Layout in React

Lesson 4: (18:25)

How to Build React Grid Layouts With Custom Column Numbers

Lesson 5: (11:04)

How to Build a React Responsive Grid Layout

Lesson 6: (12:27)

How to Build Responsive React Text Elements With InlineCluster

Lesson 7: (23:22)

How to Add Inline Styling to React Components

Module 4: Layout Primitives - The Wrappers

Lesson 1: (2:39)

Introduction to Layout Wrapper Primitives

Lesson 2: (13:44)

How to Build a Pricing Page Widget in React With PadBox

Lesson 3: (14:27)

Automatically Center Text DIVs with React Center Component

Lesson 4: (19:59)

Resize Images And Maintain Aspect Ratio in React and CSS

Lesson 5: (17:14)

How to Vertically Center a DIV in React With CSS

Lesson 6: (8:54)

How to Build Accessible Navigation Divs in React

Module 5: Composing Layouts in Practice

Lesson 1: (1:32)

Introduction to The Settings Pages

Lesson 2: (24:10)

How to Build a React Navbar With a Menu and Header

Lesson 3: (16:17)

How to Build a React Sidebar Menu

Lesson 4: (20:05)

How to Build a Profile Settings Page in React

Lesson 5: (14:05)

How to Build a Privacy Page with Toggle Buttons in React

Automatically Center Text DIVs with React Center Component