6:30pm
Gather, meet, chat, and eat food provided by Groupon
7:00pm
CSS is a Mangy Beast
presented by Billy Whited
You know it, I know it: CSS is messy and difficult to maintain. It adheres dogmatically to that second law of thermodynamics which roughly states:
"â¦that in general the total entropy of any system will not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other...
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6:30pm
Gather, meet, chat, and eat food provided by Groupon
7:00pm
CSS is a Mangy Beast
presented by Billy Whited
You know it, I know it: CSS is messy and difficult to maintain. It adheres dogmatically to that second law of thermodynamics which roughly states:
"â¦that in general the total entropy of any system will not decrease other than by increasing the entropy of some other system."
CSS is not a programming language, and it doesnât behave like one. Itâs leaky, mysterious, open to interpretation and governed by a rather peculiar set of so-called "best practices." Its inevitable decay into âa spaghetti tangle of duplication and unpredictabilityâ seems unavoidable.
But is it?
As squishy and imperfect as it is, I love writing CSS. At times, I find it to be a nice contrast to the cold rationality of programming. But you canât make it work just by trying harder.
In fact, itâs questionable whether you can âmake it workâ at all. What we must do instead is effectively manage it. We must critically examine our approach to writing CSS (think:Â storytelling), reassess the strategies we use to implement it and, above all else, modularize, modularize, modularize.
In this talk we'll explore a few of the techniques I've found useful in dealing with CSS on client projects and touch on the following:
* SMACSS (a la Snook) with a touch of OOCSS (a la Sullivan).
* SOLID design principles
* Evolutionary design
* Naming conventions
* Humane formatting, with a bit of panache
* Kneath documenting syntax
* SCSS (CSS Preprocessor)
About Billy
Billy Whited is the lead UX Craftsman responsible for managing graphic design and frontâ