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

The closing curly brace


Now my friends we have reached the end of this little book.

While I'd hope that some of you might be able to take ECSS off the peg and start implementing it wholesale, I'll be just as happy if it merely provokes your own journey of discovery.

At the outset I was trying to find an approach to scaling CSS that dealt with the following problems:

  • To allow the easy maintenance of a large CSS codebase over time

  • To allow portions of CSS code to be removed from the codebase without effecting the remaining styles

  • It should be possible to rapidly iterate on any new designs

  • Changing the properties and values applied to one visual element should not unintentionally effect others

  • Any solution should require minimal tooling and workflow changes to implement

  • Where possible, W3C standards such as ARIA should be used to communicate state change within the user interface

ECSS answers all of those problems:

  • Compartmentalizing CSS into modules allows easy removal of deprecated features

  • The unique...