What is Modular CSS?

Baking accessibility into components: how frameworks help

A very thoughtful post by Hidde that draws a useful distinction between the “internals” of a component (the inner workings of a React component, Vue component, or web component) and the code that wires those components together (the business logic):

I really like working on the detailed stuff that affects users: useful keyboard navigation, sensible focus management, good semantics. But I appreciate not every developer does. I have started to think this may be a helpful separation: some people work on good internals and user experience, others on code that just uses those components and deals with data and caching and solid architecture. Both are valid things, both need love. Maybe we can use the divide for good?

Web Components will replace your frontend framework

I’ve often said that the goal of a good library should be to make itself redundant. jQuery is the poster child for that, and this article points to web components as the way to standardise what’s already happening in JavaScript frameworks:

Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.

The article goes on to give a good technical overview of custom elements, templates, and the Shadow DOM, but I was surprised to see it making reference to the is syntax for extending existing HTML elements—I’m pretty sure that that is, sadly, dead in the water.

A Tale of Two Buttons

In defence of the cascade (especially now that we’ve got CSS custom properties).

I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.

Remember, every time you set a property in CSS you are in fact overriding something (even if it’s just the default user agent styles). In other words, CSS code is mostly expressing exceptions to a default design.

On container queries. — Ethan Marcotte

Unsurprisingly, I completely and utterly agree with Ethan’s assessment here:

I’ve written some code that’s saying, “Once the screen is this size and the element appears in a different, smaller container, use a narrower layout on this element.”

But, well, that’s weird. Why can’t we apply styles based on the space available to the module we’re designing, rather than looking at the shape of the viewport?

I also share his frustration with the “math is hard; let’s go shopping” response from browser vendors:

There’s an incredible clamor for container queries, with folks from every corner of the responsive community asking for something that solves this problem. So personally, I’d love to see at least one browser vendor partner with the RICG, and get properly fired up about this.

We had to drag browser makers kicking and screaming to responsive images (to this day, Hixie maintains it’s not a problem that needs solving) and I suspect even more activism is going to be needed to get them to tackle container queries.

MaintainableCSS - an approach to writing modular, scalable and maintainable CSS | By Adam Silver

Adam Silver has written a free online book all about writing maintainable CSS. It dives straight into naming things and takes it from there.

MaintainableCSS is an approach to writing modular, scalable and of course, maintainable CSS.