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

Chapter 2. The Problems of CSS at Scale

In the last chapter, we talked about the scenario which gave rise to the ECSS methodology. A large, CSS codebase that developers found difficult to reason about, cumbersome to work with and was littered with poorly commented and redundant code. However, no CSS codebase starts this way.

In most projects, the CSS starts out with some simple rules. At the outset, you'd have to be doing something fairly daft to make maintenance of the CSS problematic.

However, as the project grows, so too does the CSS. Requirements become more complicated. More authors get involved writing the styles. Edge cases and browser workarounds need to be authored and factored in. It's easy for things to get unruly fast.

Let's consider the growing demands on a humble widget:

  • When the widget is in the sidebar, can we reduce the font size?

  • When we're on the home page, can the widget have a different background colour?

  • Can we have the things inside the widget stacked vertically at...