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

Summary


If you've developed on the Web for any non-trivial period of time you will know that the answer to most web related questions is it depends. I hate that there are no simple, cast-iron rules in relation to CSS performance that can be banked upon in every situation. I'd genuinely love to write those rules out here in a nice little paragraph and believe they would be universally true. But I can't because there simply aren't any universal cast-iron truths in relation to performance. There can't ever be any because there are simply too many variables. Engines update, layout methods become optimised, every DOM tree is different, all CSS files are different. On and on ad infinitum. You get the picture.

I'm afraid the best I can offer is to not sweat things like CSS selectors or layout methods in advance. It's unlikely they will be your problem (but, you know, they just might). Instead, concentrate on making the thing. Then, when the thing is made, test the thing. If it's slow or broke, find the problem and fix the thing.

Additional Information