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

Summary


Of all the existing CSS methodologies I looked at, I took the most from BEM. There is much to appreciate in BEM:

  • All elements get the same specificity; a class is added to all the elements.

  • There is no use of type selectors so HTML structure isn't tightly coupled to the styles.

  • It's easy to reason about what the parent of an element is, whether viewing the DOM tree in the browser developer tools or the CSS in a code editor.

However, the use of modifiers didn't really fit my needs. Although perhaps it wasn't preferable, my reality was that often I would need to override styles on a Block (in BEM parlance) depending upon some eventuality above it or by the side of it in the DOM.

For example, in the scenario where existing logic is already determined in an application, there may be a scenario where a class like contains2columns would be added above the item in question in the DOM and I would need to style changes based upon that, as opposed to changes directly upon the Block in question...