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

Naming classes and selectors with ECSS


Back in Chapter 3, Implementing Received Wisdom, I recognised the benefits that the BEM approach of naming CSS selectors gave us. Naming a block and then naming any child elements in relation to that block created a namespace for the child elements.

Namespacing the CSS of a module creates a form of isolation. By preventing name collisions with other elements, chunks of CSS can be more easily moved from one environment to another (from prototype to production for example). It's also far less likely that a change of styles on one selector would inadvertently affect another.

Note

There are a number of other approaches to solve the name collision problem. For example, if you are building an application with the popular React (https://facebook.github.io/react/) framework, consider Radium (https://github.com/FormidableLabs/radium) which will inline the styles for each node so you can effectively serve no CSS at all. Naturally, there are trade-offs such as a...