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 4. Introducing the ECSS Methodology

In the last chapter we considered existing CSS methodologies, and where, for your humble authors needs, they fell short.

I'm not about to try and convince you that the Enduring CSS approach is the Alpha and the Omega. However, it does have different strengths and aims than the existing approaches. Therefore, even if taking it wholesale doesn't appeal, I'd hope there may be something you can borrow to solve your own issues.

Highlights of ECSS:

  • It gains maintainability by isolating each visual pattern

  • File size remains minimal over long periods of time by virtue of the fact that you can cut out sections/features/components with impunity

  • Rules are self-quarantining

  • Class names/selectors can communicate context, originating logic and variation

  • All rules, their effects and reach are entirely predictable

When I first wrote about Enduring CSS I was expecting a backlash of sorts. At that time (August 2014), no-one was really advocating what I was suggesting....