Using the Angular Material component library gave me some great looking controls, but adding the library into my app increased its size by more than I had anticipated. It's a good thing Angular Material is an optional component, so I don't have to use it for space-constrained projects. Something else not core to Angular framework is page layout. I thought it might be part of Angular Material, but I found nothing there, either.

Looking around online for some kind of page layout component for Angular apps, I found something called "Angular Flex Layout" which, like Angular Material, is an optional component. It sounds like the component had always provided a bridge across the gap between the potential capabilities of CSS and the actual capabilities of CSS in shipping browsers. Several years ago, that gap was quite large! But now it appears the gap is small enough for Angular Flex Layout to ride off into the sunset.

I found more details on Angular team blog post "Modern CSS in Angular: Layouts", which confirmed they intend for modern CSS (flexbox and grid got specific callouts) to handle most of what people formerly needed "Angular Flex layout" for. This blog post claimed to be the first in a series of helping people adopt modern standardized CSS for layout instead of using libraries like Angular Flex Layout, but I haven't seen any additional installments posted. I'll stay tuned hoping to learn more in the future.

For needs beyond modern CSS, that blog post pointed to layout-related features within Angular's Component Development Kit (CDK). I read over some introductory pages and didn't comprehend very much. I hope that after I become more familiar with CSS and Angular, I can articulate the gap CDK Layout fulfills.

And finally, that blog post also mentions using Tailwind CSS in Angular apps, but without further information. I know nothing about Tailwind and very little about Angular and CSS. At the moment I have no idea what tradeoffs are involved in using that library. I'll stick that on my "To Do" list at the bottom. Right now I have a higher priority item on my list: get a handle on Angular unit testing.