Fixed-Height Cards: More Fragile Than They Look

Fixed-height CSS cards appear stable in design mockups but break under real-world conditions like longer translations, user font size changes, or missing images. The post walks through why fixed heights fail, how absolutely positioned elements and line clamping mask underlying fragility, and how to rebuild the component using intrinsic sizing, CSS Grid stretch alignment, and flexbox column layout. Key fixes include removing the fixed height, letting the grid handle equal heights via stretch, converting cards to flex column containers, and using fluid typography with clamp(). A stress-test mode is also demonstrated to proactively surface layout failures before shipping.