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

The cascade


Typically, the cascade part of Cascading Style Sheets is useful. Even if specificity is very equal across the selectors used, the cascade allows equivalent rules further down the CSS to be applied over existing rules higher up.

However, in a large codebase, the cascade presents an undesirable temptation; the ability for developers to take a short cut of amending the existing CSS by simply writing more new code at the bottom of the existing CSS.

This temptation is both real and easy to identify with. It can be tempting for a number of reasons. As an example, authors more familiar with other languages that need to make changes to the CSS may lack the confidence or intimate knowledge of the CSS codebase to be able to confidently remove or amend the existing code. They therefore take the safest option and override existing rules using a more specific set of rules. At the time it seems like the responsible thing to do—just adding one or two rules as needed.

However, the problem with...