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

ARIA attributes as CSS selectors


In our preferred CSS syntax, writing that change within a single set of braces would look like this:

.co-Button {
    background-color: $color-button-passive;
    &[aria-selected="true"] {
        background-color: $color-button-selected;
    }
}

We use the ampersand (&) as a parent selector and the attribute selector to leverage the enhanced specificity having the aria attribute on the node provides. Then we can just style the changes as needed.

The ability to nest state changes within a rule in this manner provides increased developer ergonomics. The intention is that a rule is only defined at root level once throughout the entire application styles. This provides a single source of truth to define all possible eventualities pertaining to that class. For more information, ensure you read Chapter 8, The Ten Commandments of Sane Style Sheets.

Tip

As a related note, the CSS Selectors Level 4 specification (https://drafts.csswg...