Link tags: sass

Fluid type sizes and spacing — Piper Haywood

Prompted by Utopia, Piper shares her methodology for fluid type in Sass.

Modern CSS in a Nutshell - Cloud Four

I like this high-level view of the state of CSS today. There are two main takeaways:

1. Custom properties, flexbox, and grid are game-changers.
2. Pre- and post-processers are becoming less and less necessary.

This is exactly the direction we should be going in! More and more power from the native web technologies (while still remaining learnable), with less and less reliance on tooling. For CSS, the tools have been like polyfills that we can now start to remove.

Alas, while the same should be true of JavaScript (there’s so much you can do in native JavaScript now), people seem to have tied their entire identities to the tooling they use.

They could learn a thing or two from the trajectory of CSS: treat your frameworks as cattle, not pets.

New principle: Do not design around third-party tools unless it actually breaks the Web · Issue #335 · w3ctag/design-principles

There’s a really interesting discussion here, kicked off by Lea, about balancing long-term standards with short-term pragmatism. Specifically, it’s about naming things.

Naming things is hard. Naming things in standards, doubly so.

Using the platform

Elise Hein documents what it was like to build a website (or web app, if you prefer) the stackless way:

• use custom elements (for modular HTML without frameworks)
• use the in-browser package manager (for JavaScript packages without build tools)
• match pages with files (to avoid routing and simplify architecture)
• stick to standards (to avoid obsolescence and framework fatigue)

Her conclusions are similar to my own: ES6 modules mean you can kiss your bundler goodbye; web components are a mixed bag—it’s frustrating that Apple are refusing to allow native elements to be extended. Interestingly, Elise feels that a CSS preprocessor is still needed for her because she wants to be able to nest selectors …but even that’s on its way now!

Perhaps we might get to the stage where it isn’t an automatic default to assume you’ll need bundling, concatenation, transpiling, preprocessing, and all those other tasks that we’ve become dependent on build tools for.

I have a special disdain for beginner JavaScript tutorials that have you run create-react-app as the first step, and this exercise has only strengthened my conviction that every beginner programmer should get to grips with HTML, CSS and vanilla JS before delving into frameworks. Features native to the web are what all frameworks share, and knowing the platform makes for a stronger foundation in the face of change.

Sass Color Functions in CSS | Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

I’m not the only one swapping out Sass with CSS for colour functions:

Because of the declarative nature of CSS, you’re never going to get something as terse as what you could get in Sass. So sure, you’re typing more characters. But you know what you’re not doing? Wrangling build plugins and updating dependencies to get Sass to build. What you write gets shipped directly to the browser and works as-is, now and for eternity. It’s hard to say that about your Sass code.

CSS { In Real Life } | Building a dependency-free site in 2019

I think we’re often guilty of assuming that because our tools are great solutions for some things, they’re automatically the solution for everything.

Stepping away from Sass

I think Cathy might’ve buried the lede:

The knock on effect of this was removing media queries. As I moved towards some of the more modern features of CSS the need to target specific screen sizes with unique code was removed.

But on the topic of Sass, layout is now taken care of with CSS grid, variables are taken care of with CSS custom properties, and mixins for typography are taken care of with calc().

Personally, I’ve always found the most useful feature of Sass to simply be that you can have lots of separate Sass files that get combined into one CSS file—very handy for component libraries.

Sass Selectors: To Nest Or Not To Nest? | Brad Frost

The fascinating results of Brad’s survey.

Personally, I’m not a fan of nesting. I feel it obfuscates more than helps. And it makes searching for a specific selector tricky.

That said, Danielle feels quite strongly that nesting is the way to go, so on Clearleft projects, that’s how we write Sass + BEM.

Nobody Said CSS Is Easy

One thing I gained a stronger awareness of (simply from working with checkboxes) is that it’s important to progressively enhance UI components, so that a fancy custom one is able to fall back to the default browser styles and functionality. This way, a user can still access the UI if JavaScript or CSS fail.

Herman: Automated Pattern Libraries | OddBird

A lightweight style guide generator. This one uses SassDoc to parse out the documentation for colours, type, etc.

V6: Typography and Proportions | Rob Weychert

Rob walks us through the typographic choices for his recent redesign:

Most of what I design that incorporates type has a typographic scale as its foundation, which informs the typeface choices and layout proportions. The process of creating that scale begins by asking what the type needs to do, and what role contrasting sizes will play in that.

Patterns Day 2017: Sareh Heidari on Vimeo

Time for another video from Patterns Day. Here’s Sareh Heidari walking us through Grandstand, the CSS framework at the BBC.

“Cooking with Design Systems,” an article by Dan Mall

Dan describes his approach to maintainable CSS. It’s a nice balance between semantic naming and reusable styles.

Warning: the analogies used here might make you very, very hungry.

Thoughtful CSS Architecture | Sparkbox | Web Design and Development

A good overview of ideas and techniques for structuring CSS and naming classes.

The Sonos Pattern Library — zdfs

There’s a lot I disagree with here. I don’t think this pattern library process is very elegant or scalable, and it certainly wouldn’t work for me.

But I’m still linking to it. Why? Because I think it’s absolutely wonderful that people share their processes like this. It doesn’t matter one whit whether or not it would work for me.

Frontend development may have gotten a lot more complicated, but the simple premise of sharing what you’ve learned hasn’t.

I couldn’t agree more!

How to lint your Sass/CSS properly with Stylelint — Creative Nightly

Linting CSS seems like a very good idea, especially if you’re not the only one writing the CSS. This guide is going to come in very handy when I give it a try.

Sass Guidelines

Advice for writing Sass. I don’t necessarily agree with everything, but on the whole, this is a solid approach.

It’s worth bearing Chris’s advice in mind.

GitHub’s CSS · @mdo

Mark Otto talks through the state of Github’s CSS and the processes behind updating it. There’s a nice mix of pragmatism and best practices, together with a recognition that there’s always room for improvement.

Specializing yourself into a corner by Scott Kellum

I can empathise with Scott’s worries about fragmentation on the front-end with Saas, Styles, LESS, Compass, yada, yada, yada.

I want to share my code with everyone who writes CSS, not a subset of that group.

IE-friendly mobile-first CSS with Sass 3.2

Jake demonstrates his technique for preprocessor-generated stylesheets for older versions of Internet Explorer (while other browsers get the same styles within media queries).