Maintainable stylesheets with Sass

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Writing maintainable CSS with Sass

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@polarblau

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( https://github.com/polarblau/maintainable-stylesheets/ )

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Alltag (Everyday life)

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Technical debt Confidence LOC

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Alltag & Stylesheets

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Technical debt Confidence LOC

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Why? What makes the work with stylesheets painful?

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It’s too easy!

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It’s easy to learn, everybody can do it!

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It’s easy to read, but hard to comprehend.

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It’s easy to start, but hard to scale.

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Let’s get serious!

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programming == serious_business css == programming

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New Legacy

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New project

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Define all rules!

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Distribute all the rules!

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Enforce all the rules!

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Rules:

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Version control

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What would do?

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HTML

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Stay clear of frameworks

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Keep styles where they belong

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Files

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Composition / Color / Type Elements of a visual language

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/layout /colors /typography

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/layout /colors /typography /helpers /base (reset, etc.) /ie /print

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Media queries?

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=respond-to($media) @if $media == desktop @media screen and (min-width: 1280px) @content @else if $media == large-screen @media screen and (min-width: 1400px) @content

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h1 font-size: 2em +respond-to(desktop) h1 font-size: 3em

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Keep files small and readable

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No content

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Nesting for brevity

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#content h2 strong color: red &.foo font-size: 1.2em

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Mixins for clarity

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=custom-serif($weight: normal) font-family: "ff-tisa-web-pro", Georgia, serif @if $weight == bold font-weight: 700 @else font-weight: 300

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h1 +custom-serif

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=greyscale +prefixer(filter, grayscale(100%))

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Plan for re–usability

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Documentation

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/* This comment is * several lines long. * since it uses the CSS comment syntax, * it will appear in the CSS output. */ body color: black // These comments are only one line long each. // They won't appear in the CSS output, // since they use the single-line comment syntax. a color: green

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/* This comment is * several lines long. * since it uses the CSS comment syntax, * it will appear in the CSS output. */ body { color: black; } a { color: green; }

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// @file colors.sass // // @description Colors definitions as Sass variables. // @authors Florian Plank (florian@polarblau.com)

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Keep an (up–to–date) style guide

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http://assets.warpspire.com/images/kss/styleguide-full.png

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Semantic naming

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“I’d describe semantics as it relates to HTML as tags, classes, IDs, and attributes describing but not specifying the content they enclose.” —Chris Coyier

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Foo

Bar

Bat

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Foo

Bat

Baz

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Decouple styles from mark–up structure?

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.social li:nth-child(1) { … } .social li:nth-child(2) { … } .social li:nth-child(3) { … }

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.social .twitter { … } .social .facebook { … } .social .linkedin { … }

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Validate?

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Use !important as a debugging tool (thing “console.log()”)

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Test? (Selenium, JS, …)

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… nitty gritty details

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Indentation (flat, tree?) Position of braces Short form or long Class name separators

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Legacy project

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Fix readability

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Remove unused styles

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Extract variables (Sass)

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Search and fix obvious duplication

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—Specificity

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specificity = a, b, c, d a = inline styles b = ID c = classes/attributes/pseudo–classes d = elements and pseudo–elements