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

Why the ten commandments?


The following, highly opinionated, set of rules came about as a way to author predictable style sheets across teams of developers. Each rule can be enforced with tooling. When there is just one CSS developer on a project, spending time developing or integrating tooling may seem superfluous. However, beyond a couple of active developers the tooling will earn its time investment time and again. We will deal with the tooling to police the rules in the next chapter. For now, let's consider the syntax and the rules themselves.

Tooling

To achieve more maintainable style sheets we can lean upon PostCSS, a piece of CSS tooling that allows the manipulation of CSS with JavaScript. The curious can look here for more information: https://github.com/postcss/postcss

PostCSS facilitates the use of an extended CSS syntax. For the purpose of authoring, the syntax used borrows heavily from Sass (http://sass-lang.com/). This provides functionality to make our authoring style sheets...