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 problems ECSS solves


My primary goal with ECSS was to isolate styles as opposed to abstracting them.

Ordinarily, it makes sense to create CSS classes that are abstractions of common functionality. The benefit being that they can then be re-used and re-applied on many varied elements. That's sound enough in principle. The problem is, on larger and more complicated user interfaces, it becomes impossible to make even minor tweaks and amendments to those abstractions without inadvertently effecting things you didn't intend to.

A guiding principle with ECSS therefore was to isolate styles to the intended target.

Depending upon your goals, even at the cost of repetition, isolation can buy you greater advantages; allowing for predictable styling and simple decoupling of styles.

A further advantage of isolating styles is that designers can be encouraged to bring whatever they need making, without necessarily feeling encumbered by existing visual patterns. Every new module that needs to be coded...