Principles we use to write CSS for modern browsers

index.md

Recently CSS has got a lot of negativity. But I would like to defend it and show, that with good naming convention CSS works pretty well.

My 3 developers team has just developed React.js application with 7668 lines of CSS (and just 2 !important). During one year of development we had 0 issues with CSS. No refactoring typos, no style leaks, no performance problems, possibly, it is the most stable part of our application.

Here are main principles we use to write CSS for modern (IE11+) browsers:

• SUIT CSS naming conventions + SUIT CSS design principles;
• PostCSS + CSSNext. Future CSS syntax like variables, nesting, and autoprefixer are good enough;
• Flexbox is awesome. No need for grid framework;
• Normalize.css, base styles and variables are solid foundation for all components;
• No DRY. It does not scale with CSS, just focus on better components;

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Update: video from ReactiveConf 2016

SMACSS is actually nearly identical to BEM. (Not intentionally, mind you. I didn't become aware of BEM until after I had written the book.)

SMACSS is restrictive and component oriented. As for easy to get started, well, clearly I have some work to do. :)

Are we at the point where we can realistically use flexbox? (With polyfills for IE etc. - what's a good one?)

@wub For many applications, yes. Just use autoprefixer and use the modern flexbox syntax for automatic support back to ie10.

JS polyfills for <=ie9 support are not worth it, IMO.

The power flexbox gives you (making certain things possible in CSS that were impossible before) should be a large counter argument in your decision to support < ie10.

Thank you for writing this. It helps lessen the insanity that CSS beginners go through.

@alekseykulikov do you use global variables or only for each component in components file?

@lavezzi1 I use global variables to define colors and media queries, and local for component specific logic, like sizes and so on.