title: Why is my empty cell not working on CSS grids?
body: <p>I have a CSS Grid, and my <code>grid-template-areas</code> property has <code>.</code> which don't seem to be applying white space. Why is this?</p>
  
  <p><div class="snippet" data-lang="js" data-hide="false" data-console="true" data-babel="false">
  <div class="snippet-code">
  <pre class="snippet-code-css lang-css prettyprint-override"><code>.nav {
    /*    padding: 1rem 1.75rem 0.1rem 1.75rem;*/
    text-align: center;
    font-size: 2rem;
    display: grid;
    width: 100%;
    grid-template-columns: 20px 1fr 1fr 1fr 1fr 20px;
    grid-template-areas: ". main blog work contact .";
    /*    grid-gap: 20px;*/
  }
  
  
  /*Nav li style removal*/
  
  .nav li {
    list-style: none;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0;
    display: inline;
    text-decoration: none;
  }
  
  
  /*Nav link styling*/
  
  ul {
    padding: 0;
  }
  
  .nav a {
    text-decoration: none;
    font-family: 'Monoton', cursive;
    color: #000;
    text-transform: uppercase;
  }
  
  #main-link {
    grid-area: main;
  }
  
  #blog-link {
    grid-area: blog;
  }
  
  #work-link {
    grid-area: work;
  }
  
  #contact-link {
    grid-area: contact;
  }</code></pre>
  <pre class="snippet-code-html lang-html prettyprint-override"><code>&lt;nav id="navigation"&gt;
  
    &lt;ul class="nav"&gt;
  
      &lt;li class="navbutton navhover"&gt;&lt;a href="blogs.html" id="main-link"&gt;Main&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li class="navbutton navhover"&gt;&lt;a href="blogs.html" class="currentlink" id="blog-link"&gt;Blog&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li class="navbutton navhover" id="work-link"&gt;&lt;a href="work.html"&gt;Work&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
      &lt;li class="navbutton navhover" id="contact-link"&gt;&lt;a href="contact.html"&gt;Contact&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
  
    &lt;/ul&gt;
  
  
  &lt;/nav&gt;</code></pre>
  </div>
  </div>
  </p>
  
  <p>The key bit being:</p>
  
  <pre><code>grid-template-columns: 20px 1fr 1fr 1fr 1fr 20px;
  grid-template-areas: ". main blog work contact .";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>why are the .'s not applying white space?</p>