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

Browser representatives on CSS performance


While I generally never worry CSS selectors when authoring a style sheet (typically I just put a class on anything I want to style and select it directly) every so often I see comments from people way smarter than me that relate specifically to a certain selector. Here's a quote from Paul Irish (https://www.paulirish.com/) in relation to a post on A List Apart from Heydon Pickering (http://alistapart.com/article/quantity-queries-for-css) which used a specific type of selector:

These selectors are among the slowest possible. ~500 slower than something wild like div.box:not(:empty):last-of-type .title”. Test page http://jsbin.com/gozula/1/quiet That said, selector speed is rarely a concern, but if this selector ends up in a dynamic webapp where DOM changes are very common, it could have a large effect. So, good for many use cases but keep in mind it might become a perf bottleneck as the app matures. Something to profile at that point. Cheers

What are we to take from that? Do we try and hold that kind of selector in some do not use in case of emergency vault in our heads?

To try and get some real answers, I asked the smart folks who actually work on browsers what they think we should concern ourselves with in regards to CSS performance.

In the front-end world we are lucky that the Chrome Developer relations team are so accessible. However, I like balance. In addition, I reached out to people at Microsoft and Firefox and included some great input from WebKit too.