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

Organising modules, their components, and naming files


At this point, I think it will be useful to consider a more detailed example module structure. It's similar to the structure in which I'm used to employing ECSS. It's a little more involved than our prior examples and gives another subtly different variation on how files could be organised and selectors named. As ever, from our CSS point of view our aim is isolation, consistency and solid developer ergonomics. Let's take a look.

Suppose we have a module. Its job is to load the sidebar area of our site. The directory structure might initially look like this:

SidebarModule/ => everything SidebarModule related lives in here
  /assets => any assets (images etc) for the module
  /css => all CSS files
  /min => minified CSS/JS files
  /components => all component logic for the module in
  here
  css-namespaces.json => a file to define all namespaces
  SidebarModule.js => logic for the module...