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

Summary


In this chapter we've covered tooling to facilitate constant code quality and an improved style sheet authoring experience. However, you should be aware that out of everything we have covered, the specific tools listed here are likely to be the most short-lived. Tooling technology moves at a blistering pace. In just three years I went from vanilla CSS, to Sass (with scss-lint (https://github.com/brigade/scss-lint)), to PostCSS and Stylelint while also moving from GUI build tools like CodeKit to JavaScript build tools Grunt, then Gulp and now NPM scripts.

I have no idea what the best choice will be in 6 months time so the take away is to think about how tooling and approaches can improve the style sheet authoring experience across your teams, not necessarily what the current tools are.

 

Be monogamous in your personal relationships and a philandering whore in your choice of tools and techniques

 
 --The Way Of Pragmatic Coding (https://benfrain.com/be-better-front-end-developer-way-of...