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

Optimisation


When CSS is heading for production, it takes an extra step through cssnano (http://cssnano.co/). It's a fantastic and modular CSS minifier by the extraordinarily talented Ben Briggs. Highly recommended.

Besides the more obvious minification step that cssnano provides, there are a number of micro-optimisations you can perform on your CSS just by incorporating plugins from the PostCSS eco-system. For example, by consistently ordering your CSS declarations, Gzip can compress the style sheet more effectively. That's not a job I want to do manually but the postcss-sorting (https://github.com/hudochenkov/postcss-sorting) plugin can do it for free. Here's comparison of Gzip file sizes using the various declaration sorting configurations.

To exemplify, I took a large test CSS file, and unsorted once Gzipped it was 37.59 kB. Here are the file sizes of that same file when Gzipped after using the other declaration sorting configurations:

  • postcss-sorting: 37.54

  • CSSComb: 37.46

  • Yandex: 37.48

  • Zen...