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 cost of repetition?


To fully reap the benefits of ECSS you need to be comfortable with the property and value repetition it creates. At this point, you may believe me deluded. With all this duplication, how can this ECSS approach be a viable option? I'll address that concern with one word: gzip.

OK, I lied. I'd like to qualify that further.

gzip is incredibly efficient at compressing repetitive strings

I was curious what real world difference the verbosity of repeated property/value pairs in an approach like ECSS actually made? An experiment:

The resultant CSS file of a ECSS based project I was working on, when gzipped (as it would be served over the wire), was 42.9 KB. That's a significantly sized CSS file.

The most common and verbose patterns that could be abstracted from this style sheet to an OOCSS class was a couple of Flex based rules that were used abundantly throughout to vertically centre content within their container. They were even more verbose thanks to the fact that there was...