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

Building CSS from authoring style sheets


A build system of some sort is required to compile the authoring style sheets into plain CSS.

Tip

There are many tools available to perform this task e.g Grunt, Gulp, and Brocolli to name just a few. However, just as there is no universally right CSS processor, or CSS methodology, so there is no universally right build tool.

Besides merely compiling authoring style sheets into CSS, good tooling can provide further benefits.

  • Linting: To enable code conformity and prevent non-working code reaching deployment

  • Aggressive minification: Rebasing z-indexes, converting length values to smaller length values e.g. (while 1pt is equivalent to 16px it is one less character), merging alike selectors

  • Autoprefixer: To enable fast and accurate vendor prefixing and prevent vendor prefixes being present in the authoring style sheets

Tip

For considerations of what is deemed essential, syntax-wise, in style sheet authoring, refer to Chapter 8The Ten Commandments of Sane...