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

4. Thou shalt not write vendor prefixes in the authoring style sheets


Thanks to PostCSS, we now have tooling that means it is unnecessary to write vendor prefixes for any W3C specified property/values in the authoring style sheets. The prefixes are handled auto-magically by the Autoprefixer (https://github.com/postcss/autoprefixer) tool that can be configured to provide vendor prefixes for the required level of platforms/browser support.

For example, don't do this:





    .ip-Header_Count { 
      position: absolute; 
      right: $size-full;
      top: 50%; 
      -webkit-transform: translateY(-50%); 
      -ms-transform: translateY(-50%); 
      transform: translateY(-50%); 
    }

Instead you should just write this:

.ip-Header_Count {
    position: absolute;
    right: $size-full;
    top: 50%;
    transform: translateY(-50%);
}

Not only does this make the authoring style sheets easier to read and work with, it also means that when we want to change our level of...