Rapid Templating with Serve

Slides from a talk I gave at the HTML5.tx conference.

Video here…

http://j.mp/rapid-templating

Transcript

1. Rapid Templating: “DESIGNING IN THE BROWSER” with Sass, Compass, and Serve Nathan Smith — Principal UI Architect, projekt202 HTML5.tx — Austin, TX — February 2, 2013
2. I do mobile/web UX + JavaScript at http://projekt202.com (me, on Twitter: @nathansmith)
3. Relax, don’t stress out taking notes. You can get the slides here… http://j.mp/get-serve
4. It used to be, that you could make a picture of a website, chop it up, put it back together with code, and with a little luck, maybe even turn it into a real website! (Confession: I miss those days.)
5. html body * div#id table tbody tr td a.special span { /* Dear next developer: Please forgive me! */ color: red !important; } Which isn’t to say we weren’t using CSS…
6. …but at least we had a reliable design workflow.
7. Then this happened…
9. Which of course, now looks like this…
11. And, can dynamically change into this…
13. The term “Responsive Web Design” was coined by Ethan Marcotte, in an an article published by A List Apart. Loosely defined, it means adapting to various screen sizes, using a fluid grid and @media queries in CSS.
14. Ethan also wrote a book… http://abookapart.com/products/responsive-web-design
15. Upon hearing about this new design technique, I… 1. Felt shock and denial: “Whoa, no way!” 2. Felt guilty for making a fixed-width grid. 3. Bargained: “Maybe it’ll just go away?” 4. Felt depressed, over how little I knew. 5. Started looking up: “Maybe I can learn?” 6. Reconstructed my way of thinking. 7. Felt acceptance and hope: “I can do this!” http://www.recover-from-grief.com/7-stages-of-grief.html
16. Yes, those are (very loosely interpreted) the various stages of grief. Essentially, responsive design has both obliterated, and breathed new life into, our field.
18. Like accessibility, RWD works best with advanced planning… #FAIL
19. Designers “throwing it over the wall” to developers is no longer an ideal workflow. Nowadays, all of the cool kids are working collaboratively. http://flickr.com/photos/camknows/8374910613
20. We’ve had to rethink our vantage point.
21. Venerable tools like Photoshop still have their place, but other (equally important) front-end tools have arisen as well…
24. http://thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com/post/9494864300/submission-the-compulsively-tidy-ursus-wehrli CSS served to browser Neatly organized *.sass
25. CSS Sass Compass http://sonspring.com/journal/sass-for-designers
26. Compass makes vendor prefixes easy...
27. Compass brings sanity to gradients...
28. http://sass-lang.com/editors.html Text editors and IDE’s that support Sass/SCSS syntax Aptana http://aptana.org BBEdit http://barebones.com/bbedit Chocolat http://chocolatapp.com Coda http://panic.com/coda E Text Editor http://e-texteditor.com Eclipse http://eclipse.org Emacs http://gnu.org/software/emacs Espresso http://macrabbit.com/espresso GEdit http://projects.gnome.org/gedit Komodo http://activestate.com/komodo-ide Netbeans http://netbeans.org PhpStorm http://jetbrains.com/phpstorm PyCharm http://jetbrains.com/pycharm RubyMine http://jetbrains.com/ruby SubEthaEdit http://codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit Sublime Text http://sublimetext.com/dev TextMate http://macromates.com Vim http://vim.org Visual Studio http://microsoft.com/visualstudio ^ We  recommend
29. For the past two years or so, my preferred approach to rapid prototyping templates (with Sass & Compass) has been Serve… http://get-serve.com
31. Continuing the analogy, Serve is like… http://hdwallpapers.in/the_avengers-wallpapers.html
32. Since I can’t show you NDA’d client stuff I’ve made using Serve, we are going to look at one of my personal projects. http://unsemantic.com
35. I think of wireframes and prototypes like this… http://blogs.pennmanor.net/hstsa/nasa/nasa-space-project
36. Ultimately, what we’re aiming to launch is not a PSD file or PDF wireframe. Nor is it the flat HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that comprise a dynamic prototype. Everything except the final product exists just to facilitate the launch. It’s chaff that burns up, once the real thing takes flight. To that end, Serve is like the V of Ruby on Rails’ MVC. It is similar to the “real thing.”
37. This is the index.html.erb home page “view” file.
38. _layout.html.erb points to application.html.erb This file has one code snippet… <%= render :template => "/layouts/application" %>
39. <%= yield %> outputs the view file (index, etc.)
40. This file also renders the <head> partial.
41. Which then renders the stylesheets partial.
42. That has all sorts of interesting goodies.
43. Next up, let’s look at the Sass variables partial…
45. Which is imported by the base grid file… Okay, cool.
47. Which is imported by the responsive partial… Eh? Another @import?
49. Which is finally imported by application.sass… Seriously, what the?
51. Bear with me. There’s a point to all of this. We’ll get to it. Dude, there’d better be.
53. So, after all of that, we end up with a tightly compiled, single application.css file. Eh? What about all the @import statements? HTTP requests, fool. C’mon man!
55. That’s the beauty of Sass. If you @import a *.sass (or *.scss) file, it becomes part of the single, compiled *.css file. Rage subsiding? Okay, good. Still, why all the @import daisy chaining? Glad you asked! :)
56. ← The astute observers amongst you perhaps have noticed what looks like a big compost heap of compiled CSS files. Oh, you saw that? Well…
57. Most of those files aren’t used directly, but…
58. …exist to show grid CSS, apart from the site.
59. Those are also the flat CSS files on GitHub.
60. This is why grid code is in separate partials…
61. Hat tip to Nicolas Gallagher for the idea!
62. Yep. I can identify with that! :)
63. Maybe I (don’t) know what I’m doing. Here’s an idea…
64. Simple view helper function, named “html”
65. Variable set in… /views/partials/_vars.html.erb
66. Then, we do/don't end links with *.html
67. Further evidence that I (probably don't) know what I'm doing…
68. A voodoo-magic Z shell (or Bash) recipe…
69. I hate repetitive typing, so I’ve aliased the export command — which also recursively creates a *.zip file — to… unsemantic_site_html
70. Being lazy, FTW… Computer, do my bidding!
71. That builds all the flat files, and a *.zip of it all…
72. DEMO TIME! :) Also, don’t forget you can download the slides here… http://j.mp/get-serve