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 9. Tooling for an ECSS Approach

In this final chapter we will look at some of the free and open-source tooling that's available to facilitate writing sane and maintainable style sheets.

When authoring the CSS for an enduring project, the technology employed to produce the CSS should be largely immaterial. We should always be aware that a better or more efficient tool may become available to achieve our aims and when possible, and if preferable, it should be embraced.

Therefore, it shouldn't matter whether Sass, PostCSS, LESS, Stylus, Myth or any other CSS processor is employed to author the style sheets. The authored style sheets should be as easy to migrate to another meta-language as possible, if and when needed.

Furthermore, the CSS processor employed should best serve the needs of the project as a whole and not merely the preferences of any individual author. That said, there are some necessary capabilities for the CSS processor so we will cover that briefly next.