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 6. Dealing with State Changes in ECSS

In the last chapter we considered project organisation and how to understand and apply the ECSS class naming conventions. In this chapter we will move our focus to how ECSS deals with active interfaces and how we can facilitate style changes in a rationale and accessible manner.

The majority of web applications need to deal with states.

First let's just crystallise what we mean by states. Consider some examples:

  • A user clicks a button

  • A value in an interface is updated

  • An area of an interface is disabled

  • A widget in the interface is busy

  • An entered value exceeds allowable values

  • A section of the application starts containing live data

All these eventualities can be defined as state changes. State changes that we typically need to communicate to the user. As such they are changes that need to be communicated to the DOM, and subsequently our style sheets need some sane way of catering to these needs.

How can we define these state changes in a consistent...