Enduring CSS

Key Features

• Address the problems of CSS at scale, avoiding the shortfalls of scaling CSS.
• The shortfalls of conventional approaches to scaling CSS.
• Develop consistent and enforceable selector naming conventions with ECSS.
• Learn how to organize project structure to more easily isolate and decouple visual components.

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• The problems of CSS at scale—specificity, the cascade and styles intrinsically tied to element structure.
• The shortfalls of conventional approaches to scaling CSS.
• The ECSS methodology and the problems it solves.
• How to develop consistent and enforceable selector naming conventions with ECSS.
• How to organise project structure to more easily isolate and decouple visual components.
• How to handle state changes in the DOM with ARIA or override selectors.
• How to apply ECSS to web applications and visual modules.
• Considerations of CSS tooling and processing: Sass/PostCSS and linting.
• Addressing the notion of CSS selector speed with hard data and browser representative insight

About the Author

Ben Frain, Senior Front-end Developer at bet365, is a widely respected CSS developer and industry thought leader. Ben is the author of two successful and widely respected books Responsive Web Design with HTML5 and CSS3 and Sass and Compass for Designers, both published by Packt Publishing. Ben lives in Cheshire, England with his wife and two children. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/benfrain and at his website (http://benfrain.com).

Table of Contents

1. Writing Styles for Rapidly Changing, Long-lived Projects
2. The Problems of CSS at Scale
3. Implementing Received Wisdom
4. Introducing the ECSS Methodology
5. File Organisation and Naming Conventions
6. Dealing with State Changes in ECSS
7. Applying ECSS to your Website or Application
8. The Ten Commandments of Sane Style Sheets
9. Tooling for an ECSS Approach
10. CSS Selector Performance
11. Browser Representatives on CSS Performance