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Enduring CSS

By Ben Frain
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  1. Free Chapter
    Writing Styles for Rapidly Changing, Long-lived Projects
About 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.
Publication date:
January 2017
Publisher
Packt
Pages
134
ISBN
9781787282803

 

Chapter 1.  Writing Styles for Rapidly Changing, Long-lived Projects

This isn't actually a book about writing CSS, as in the stuff inside the curly braces. It's a book about the organising and architecture of CSS; the parts outside the braces. It's the considerations that can be happily ignored on smaller projects but actually become the most difficult part of writing CSS in larger projects.

Terms like CSS at scale, or Large-scale CSS can seem quite nebulous. I'll try and clarify.

When people talk about large scale CSS or writing CSS at scale there can be a few possible metrics that relate to the large or big part of the description:

  • It might be CSS that simply has a large file size. There's a lot of CSS output and so making changes to that codebase can be difficult, as there is so much of the code to consider.

  • The CSS could be said to be large due to the complexity of the user interface that is being built with it. The overall file size may be smaller than the first situation but there may be a great many pieces of user interface that's codified in those styles. Considering how to effect changes across all of those visuals may be problematic.

  • It might be large CSS simply due to the number of developers that have, are, and will be likely to touch and change the CSS codebase.

Or, it can be all the above.

 

Defining the problem


Enduring CSS was born from my own need to define a rational approach to writing CSS on large scale web applications.

The definition of what makes something a web application as opposed to merely a web page can be divisive so let's put that aside for now. Let's simply consider the scenario in which a new approach to writing CSS was needed.

Consider an interface that was, by necessity, densely populated with visual components; sliders, buttons, input fields etc.

In addition, consider that this interface was (and is) constantly evolving and needed to be changed rapidly. Furthermore, any changes might be made by any number of different style sheet authors.

Without a clearly defined CSS writing methodology, through the many iterations, the CSS was always out of hand. The style sheets were in a perpetual state of entropy as a result of mixed approaches, different levels of technical understanding between authors and code documentation that varied greatly in quality.

So the result was CSS that was difficult to iterate upon, hard to reason about and nobody was ever quite sure where redundancy lay. Worse still, style sheet authors lacked the confidence to remove code for fear of inadvertently effecting other parts of the application.

If you've ever inherited or worked in a team on a large CSS codebase, I'm sure some of what I'm describing will sound familiar.

Therefore, at the outset of my journey, I defined some basic needs. More simply, these were the problems that any new CSS authoring approach had to solve. Here is the list of those needs:

  • 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

  • To make it possible to rapidly iterate on any new designs

  • Changing the properties and values that 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

In the next chapter we are going to look more specifically at these problems. However, first, an important cautionary note.

 

Solve your own problems


I believe in Pin Cing Do, which translates roughly as the The way of pragmatic coding (https://benfrain.com/be-better-front-end-developer-way-of-pragmatic-coding/). This means solving the problems you actually have. Therefore, I'll state something up front that may be obvious to some:

It may be that the problems I had were not the problems you have. As such, you should temper the advice and approach offered herein accordingly. Alternatively, consider that your needs may be better addressed by different approaches and methodologies. I'm not going to try and convince you that ECSS is necessarily the best solution in all situations. For example:

  • ECSS won't give you the smallest possible CSS footprint (consider Atomic CSS (http://acss.io/) for that).

  • It isn't widely used and documented (consider BEM (https://en.bem.info/) if ubiquity is a major concern).

  • ECSS does not abstract styles and allow styling of elements from a bunch of specific utility classes. You should look at OOCSS and read the writing of its many advocates for that.

OK, public service announcement out of the way. Let's head on to the next chapter. This is where we'll look at the principle problems of scaling and architecting CSS for large scale projects: specificity, the cascade, isolation and selectors tied to structural elements.

About the Author
  • Ben Frain

    Ben Frain has been a web designer/developer since 1996. He is currently employed as a UI-UX Technical Lead at bet365. Before the web, he worked as an underrated (and modest) TV actor and technology journalist, having graduated from Salford University with a degree in Media and Performance. He has written four equally underrated (his opinion) screenplays and still harbors the (fading) belief he might sell one. Outside of work, he enjoys simple pleasures: playing indoor football while his body and wife still allow it and wrestling with his two sons.

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Enduring CSS
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