Architecting CSS
The Programmer’s Guide to Effective Style Sheets
This book is dedicated to all of the CSS professionals who have ever been told they were “not real programmers.”
As an international community, the W3C starts with a mission statement: Web for All, Web on Everything. This means the Web is a medium designed to adapt to the needs and preferences of every user, and the constraints of every device. But that poses a problem for design. To quote the very first website:
“This implies no device-specific markup, or anything which requires control over fonts or colors, for example.” 1
In the early days of the Internet, web design seemed impossible. How could we have planned for every possible combination of user-needs and device capabilities into the future—from text-only terminals to smart speakers, watches, HD displays, and accessibility devices?
Nearly 30 years later, CSS is the standard web language of design, used on nearly every website and application we develop. But that broad use, and the low barriers to getting started, can lead us to underestimate this powerful language and the complex problems it is designed to solve.
As the web continues to grow its more important than ever for professional developers to understand how and why CSS works, and how we can get the most out of it.
In this book, Martine and Michael bring their experience and teaching expertise to the topic – leading us through every layer of the language: from cascade and inheritance, to progressive enhancement, web layout, responsive design, and architecture. This book is packed with guidance to keep your CSS resilient and organized.
Miriam Suzanne
Miriam Suzanneis a project manager, user-experience designer, and front-end architect. An accomplished writer and novelist, she authored “ Jump Start Sass” and is a staff-writer for CSS Tricks ( https://css-tricks.com/ ). Suzanne is a member of the Sass core team, and creator of popular open-source tools including Susy, True, and Herman. She is an Invited Expert with the W3C CSS Working Group and a teacher for the Mozilla Developer channel, producing resources for web professionals including tools, videos, articles, and demos. Suzanne is an international conference speaker and in 2017 she won the “Best Of” speaker award at CSS Dev Conference.
Writing a book is a project of passion and commitment and takes a tremendous amount of time and support from friends and family, doubly so when writing multiple books in a single year. We would like to thank our children, Brook and Xander, for their patience during this process. And of course their grandparents, Marc and Elisabeth Ebtinger, for making it possible for us to dedicate time to writing and conferences.
Without the support of the technology and speaking community, we would not be where we are today. Lee Brandt and Kevin Miller were instrumental in getting Martine to start speaking at conferences. Along with Lee, Jeff Strauss and Jon Mills helped us expand our conference presence and meet a large number of other generous people. Nate Taylor prompted Michael to start speaking about CSS. Michael first met Chris DeMars because of CSS and Chris later nominated us for the GDE, which was significantly helpful. And of course we must mention Philip Japikse, fellow speaker and Apress author, who has been tremendously supportive and without whom this book would not have happened.
Many of those who influenced us on CSS are already mentioned within the pages of this book, but it’s important to note the early and long-lasting influence that Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag have had on our understanding of CSS.
Finally, we must mention those who contributed directly to the pages you’re about to read. The Apress team of Louise Corrigan, Nancy Chen, and Phil Nash has been supportive the whole way, from walking through the proposal process to ensuring the quality of the finished book. Our last thanks goes to the many people who went above and beyond to support our research on the history of accessibility and the people involved, including Sarah Bourne, Fred de Villamil, Jon Baggaley, Andy Budd, Eric Meyer, Steven Pemberton, Dylan Wilbanks, Chris Wilson, and Chris Lilley.
is the CTO of Andromeda, Founder and Lead Developer at FlexePark, and an international speaker. She focuses on web interfaces that are beautiful, functional, accessible, and usable, approaching user experience from both art and science, drawing from her degrees in psychology and visual communications. Martine is a 2019 Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies, a 2019 Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies, and the author ofProgramming Languages ABC++ andApproachable Accessibility: Planning for Success .
is the CEO of Andromeda, Founder and Product Architect at FlexePark, an international speaker, a 2019 Google Developer Expert in Firebase, and a 2019 Microsoft MVP in Developer Technologies. For more than 20 years, he has been writing code and geeking out over technology. He is passionate about keeping things simple and focusing on what provides real value to the end user. Michael is the author ofProgramming Languages ABC++ andApproachable Accessibility: Planning for Success .
is a developer evangelist for Twilio and a Google Developer Expert. He’s been in the web industry for more than 10 years building applications and integrating APIs with JavaScript and Ruby. He’s British, but currently enjoying life in Melbourne, Australia. He can be found hanging out at meetups and conferences, playing with new technologies, or writing open source code. Phil tweets at @philnash, and you can find him elsewhere online at https://philna.sh .