Book Image

Enduring CSS

By : Ben Frain
Book Image

Enduring CSS

By: Ben Frain

Overview of this book

Learn with me, Ben Frain, about how to really THINK about CSS and how to use CSS for any size project! I'll show you how to write CSS that endures continual iteration, multiple authors, and yet always produces predictable results. Enduring CSS, often referred to as ECSS, offers you a robust and proven approach to authoring and maintaining style sheets at scale. Enduring CSS is not a book about writing CSS, as in the stuff inside the curly braces. This is a book showing you how to think about CSS, and be a smarter developer with that thinking! It's about the organisation and architecture of CSS—the parts outside the braces. I will help you think about the aspects of CSS development that become the most difficult part of writing CSS in larger projects. You’ll learn about the problems of authoring CSS at scale—including specificity, the cascade and styles intrinsically tied to document structure. I'll introduce you to the ECSS methodology, and show you how to develop consistent and enforceable selector naming conventions. We'll cover how to apply ECSS to your web applications and visual model, and how you can organize your project structure wisely, and handle visual state changes with ARIA, providing greater accessibility considerations. In addition, we'll take a deep look into CSS tooling and process considerations. Finally we will address performance considerations by examining topics such as CSS selector speed with hard data and browser-representative insight.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Enduring CSS
Credits
About the Author
Thanks
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Writing Styles for Rapidly Changing, Long-lived Projects
3
Implementing Received Wisdom

Appendix 1. CSS Selector Performance

Back at the beginning of 2014 I was having a debate (I used air-quotes there people) with some fellow developers about the irrelevance, or not, of worrying about CSS selector speed.

Whenever exchanging theories/evidence about the relative speed of CSS selectors, developers often reference Steve Souders (http://stevesouders.com/) work on CSS selectors from 2009. It's used to validate claims such as attribute selectors are slow or pseudo selectors are slow.

For the last few years, I've felt these kinds of things just weren't worth worrying about. The sound-bite I have been wheeling out for years is:

With CSS, architecture is outside the braces; performance is inside

But besides referencing Nicole Sullivan's later post on Performance Calendar (http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2011/css-selector-performance-has-changed-for-the-better/) to back up my conviction that the selectors used don't really matter, I had never actually tested the theory.

To try and address this, I attempted to produce some tests of my own that would settle the argument. At the least, I believed it would prompt someone with more knowledge/evidence to provide further data.