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

Applying ECSS to logic modules


Typically, in a web application, some programming language (e.g. JavaScript/TypeScript/Ruby/whatever), will be generating a thing.

It's often practical and desirable to use the file name of that thing as the name of the module (or component of a module). Therefore, if a file is called Header.js and generates the container for the header, any component parts of that header could be named accordingly. For example, in ECSS parlance, a company registration number might get sw-Header_Reg as its selector. By extension, a search box component inside the header might have a selector like sw-HeaderSearch_Input (the input box created by the HeaderSearch.js file).

An example

Let's consider a more concrete example. Suppose we are authoring a JavaScript client-side application and we have a component called ShoppingCartLines.js. Its task is to render out the lines within a shopping cart and it in turn displays within a module called ShoppingCart.js. The ShoppingCart module...