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Enduring CSS

Enduring CSS

By : Ben Frain
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Enduring CSS

Enduring CSS

1 (1)
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 (12 chapters)
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Preface
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1
1. Writing Styles for Rapidly Changing, Long-lived Projects
3
3. Implementing Received Wisdom

Markup structure tied to selectors

Another practice to avoid when authoring CSS for scale is using type selectors; selectors that relate to specific markup. For example:

aside#sidebar ul > li a {
    /* Styles */
}

In this case we need to have an a tag inside an li which is a direct child of a ul inside an aside element with an ID of sidebar - phew!

What happens if we want to apply those styles to a div somewhere else? Or any other markup structure?

We've just unnecessarily tied our rule to specific markup structure. It's often quite tempting to do this, as it can seem ridiculous to add a class to something as (seemingly) trivial as an a or span tag. However, I hope once you reach the end of this book you'll be convinced to avoid the practice.

We want CSS that is as loosely coupled to structure as possible. That way, should we need to introduce an override (a more specific selector for a particular instance) we can keep things as vague as possible...

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Enduring CSS
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