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

2. Thou shalt not nest, unless thou art nesting media queries or overrides


The key selector in CSS is the rightmost selector in any rule. It is the selector upon which the enclosed property/values are applied.

We want our CSS rules to be as flat as possible. We DO NOT want other selectors before a key selector (or any DOM element) unless we absolutely need them to override the default key selector styles.

The reason being that adding additional selectors and using element types (for example h1.yes-This_Selector):

  • Creates additional unneeded specificity

  • Makes it harder to maintain, as subsequent overrides need to be ever more specific

  • Adds unneeded bloat to the resultant CSS file

  • In the case of element types, ties the rule to a specific element and/or markup structure

For example, suppose we have a CSS rule like this:



   #notMe .or-me [data-thing="nope"] .yes-This_Selector {
       width: 100%;  
   }

In that above example, yes-This_Selector is the key selector. If those property/values should...