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

5. Thou shalt use variables for sizing, colours and z-index


For any project of size, setting variables for sizing, colours, and z-index is essential.

UIs are typically based upon some form of grid or sizing ratio. Therefore sizing should be based upon set sizes, and sensible delineations of those sizes. For example here is 11px based sizing and variants as variables:

$size-full: 11px;
$size-half: 5.5px;
$size-quarter: 2.75px;
$size-double: 22px;
$size-treble: 33px;
$size-quadruple: 44px;

For a developer, the use of variables offers additional economies. For example, it saves colour picking values from composites. It also helps to normalise designs.

For example, if a project uses only 13px, 15px and 22px font sizes and a change comes through requesting 14px font-sizing, the variables provide some normalisation reference. In this case, should the fonts be 13px or 15px as 14px is not used anywhere else? This allows developers to feedback possible design inconsistencies...