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

BEM


BEM is a methodology developed by the developers at http://yandex.ru.

The key thing I took from BEM is just how much a naming convention can buy you when it comes to CSS maintenance.

Note

If you are interested in reading more about BEM, the canonical resource is http://en.bem.info. For a good explanation of where it all began I recommend starting here: https://en.bem.info/method/history

Again, like SMACSS, I'm not going to attempt to fully explain the ins and outs of BEM methodology. However, I will give you the elevator pitch explanation of the key points. The BEM methodology works around the notion that key areas of a page can be defined as Blocks. In turn, those key areas are made up of Elements. We can then represent the relationship between the Block and its Elements in the way we name things. Consider the OOCSS media object example from before. In a BEM approach we might use classes like this:

<div class="media">
  <a href="#" class="media__img">
    <img class...