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

Dealing with CSS performance


At this point I'm happily re-concluding the conclusion arrived at in Appendix 1, CSS Selector Performance - that CSS selectors are rarely a problem with static pages. Plus, attempting to second guess which selector will perform well is probably futile.

However, for large DOMs and dynamic DOMs (e.g. not the odd class toggle, we are talking lots of JavaScript manipulation) it may not be beyond the realms of possibility that CSS selectors could be causing an issue. I can't speak for all of Mozilla, but I think when you're dealing with performance, you want to focus on what's slow. Sometimes that will be selectors; usually it will be other things, says L. David Baron (http://dbaron.org/), of Mozilla (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/) and a member of the W3C's CSS working group. I’ve definitely seen pages where selector performance matters, and I've definitely seen lots of pages where it doesn't.

So what should we do? What's the most pragmatic approach?

 

You should use profiling tools to determine where your performance problems are, and then work on solving those problems

 
 --Baron

Everyone I spoke to echoed these sentiments.