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

Dealing with specificity


I also wanted to negate issues surrounding specificity. To this ends, I adopted the widely used approach of insisting all selectors used a single (or as close to that ideal as possible) class-based selector.

 

If you're having CSS problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but specificity ain't one

 
 --https://twitter.com/benfrain/status/537339394706141184

Furthermore, structural HTML elements (with the exception of pseudo-elements) are NEVER referenced in the style sheets as type selectors. In addition ID selectors are completely avoided in ECSS. Not because ID selectors are bad per se, but because we need a level playing field of selector strength.

Changes to components are handled via simple overrides. However, the way they are handled from an authoring perspective makes them easy to manage and reason about.

Suppose you have an element that needs to be a different width if it is within a certain container - easy peasy, we don't need to be draconian in the...