Ben Frain
Enduring CSS
A guide to writing style sheets for large scale, rapidly changing, long-lived web projects
This isn't actually a book about writing CSS, as in the stuff inside the curly braces. It's a book about the organisation 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.
Visit the dedicated site 🚀Having bought ECSS just over a year ago I've used it in every project, no matter how big or small. It's greatly improved the productivity of myself and the team I've implemented it with. It has also been very easy to onboard everyone with.
Here are some of the topics covered in the book:
- 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 practicalities of using potentially problematic HTML elements.
- Addressing the notion of CSS selector speed with hard data and browser representative insight.
Find out more by visiting the books dedicated site: ecss.benfrain.com