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 3. Implementing Received Wisdom

You often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution -The Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s02.html)

In the last chapter we considered some of the more obvious difficulties of dealing with a large CSS codebase. In this chapter, we'll consider some existing approaches for dealing with those problems.

Over the course of two years I've went on a CSS architecture and maintenance odyssey. Near the beginning of the experience I did what any sensible developer should do. I looked to see how smart people had dealt with the problem already.

CSS architectural approaches can seem like the equivalent of diet pills for the overweight. It's easy to snatch at apparent solutions, hoping they'll be exactly what you need. However, you probably don't know exactly what you need until you've tried to solve your problems at least once.

That advice applies here too...