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

ECSS and global styles


Whilst the Lion's share of CSS in a web application can be described as module based, there is an inevitable amount of global CSS we need to deal with. From an ECSS perspective we should keep this global CSS as minimal as possible. Typically, besides any requisite reset styles, there will be a default font-size, font-family and perhaps some default colours. These are styles that are usually applied to type selectors. Unless you have classes on the root HTML element of body for example.

Note

If you are looking for a base set of reset styles for a web application you may find my App Reset CSS useful. You can find it on GitHub here: https://github.com/benfrain/app-reset  or install via NPM with npm install app-reset.

There may also be some global structure needed. For example, if you have a common structure throughout your application (header, footer, sidebar etc), you may want to create some selectors to reflect this. In the past I have used a .st- or .sw- micro-namespace...