Tags: naming

The CSS Mindset | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

This post absolutely nails what’s special about CSS …and why supersmart programmers might have trouble wrapping their head around it:

Other programming languages often work in controlled environments, like servers. They expect certain conditions to be true at all times, and can therefore be understood as concrete instructions as to how a program should execute.

CSS on the other hand works in a place that can never be fully controlled, so it has to be flexible by default.

Max goes on to encapsulate years of valuable CSS learnings into some short and snappy pieces of advices:

• Everything is a rectangle
• The Cascade is your Friend
• As much as necessary, as little as possible
• Shorthands have long effects
• Always Be Flexible
• Context is Key
• Content will change
• Find Patterns and re-use them
• Use consistent Names

No matter what your level of CSS knowledge, this post has something for you—highly recommended!

German Naming Convention

Don’t write fopen when you can write openFile. Write throwValidationError and not throwVE. Call that name function and not fct. That’s German naming convention. Do this and your readers will appreciate it.

JAMstack? More like SHAMstack. | CSS-Tricks

Chris makes the very good point that the J in JAMstack isn’t nearly as important as the static hosting part.

I also pointed out to Phil recently that the M (markup) is far more important than the J (JavaScript), which is there to enhance the M. So I suggested that the acronym be updated accordingly:

MAJstack!

This is my maj.

Naming things to improve accessibility

Some good advice from Hidde, based on his recent talk Six ways to make your site more accessible.

BEM: 4 Hang-Ups & How It Will Help Your CSS Organization

A few common gotchas when using BEM, and how to deal with them.

Weft. — Ethan Marcotte

I think we often focus on designing or building an element, without researching the other elements it should connect to—without understanding the system it lives in.

What’s in a pattern name? — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan emphasises the importance of making a shared language the heart of any design system. I heartily agree!

This isn’t new thinking, mind: folks like Alla Kholmatova and Charlotte Jackson have been talking about this for ages. (And in doing so, they’ve massively influenced how I think about modular, pattern-driven design.)

Naming Progressive Web Apps | fberriman

AMP is a symptom that someone, somewhere, thinks the web is failing so badly (so slow, so unresponsive) for a portion of the world that they want to take all the content and package it back up in a sterile, un-webby, branded box. That makes me so sad. PWAs, to me, are a potential treatment.

Code clarity - Anthony Ricaud

Breaking down programming tasks into smaller chunks …and naming things.

I’ll take a piece of paper and write the function names I’m going to implement. Or I’ll do it directly in my code editor, with real functions or comments.

It allows you to focus on one problem at a time. When you’re writing those function names, you are thinking about what the code should be doing. When you’re implementing the functions, you are thinking about how the code should do it.

Microformats : Meaningful HTML

A great one-page intro to microformats (h-card in particular), complete with a parser that exports JSON. Bookmark this for future reference.

Designing Systems, Part 3: Components and Composition / Paul Robert Lloyd

Paul finishes up his excellent three part series by getting down to the brass tacks of designing and building components on the web …and in cities. His closing provocation has echoes of Heydon’s rallying cry.

If you missed the other parts of this series, they are:

1. Theory, Practice, and the Unfortunate In-between,
2. Layers of Longevity, and
3. Components and Composition

Kiss My Classname - Zeldman on Web & Interaction Design

I understand how bloated and non-reusable code can get when a dozen people who don’t talk to each other work on it over a period of years. I don’t believe the problem is the principle of semantic markup or the cascade in CSS. I believe the problem is a dozen people working on something without talking to each other.

From Pages to Patterns – Charlotte Jackson - btconfBER2016 on Vimeo

The video of Charlotte’s excellent pattern library talk that she presented yesterday in Berlin.

Taking Pattern Libraries To The Next Level – Smashing Magazine

Here’s an epic brain dump by Vitaly on the challenges of putting together a pattern library and then maintaining it.

Sacrificing consistency for usability is fine. A slightly open-ended, inconsistent but heavily used pattern library is better than a perfectly consistent pattern library that is never used.

Museum of Wi-Fi

The Museum of Wi-Fi exists to preserve these vestiges of our neighbourhood battlefields.

Some are brilliantly smart, some are just purely gross. They all belong in the museum.

Semantic CSS - Snook.ca

Snook has been on a roll lately, sharing lots of great insights into front-end development. This is a particularly astute post about that perennial issue of naming things.

Atomic Classification | Trent Walton

There is one truism that has been constant throughout my career on the web, and it’s this: naming things is hard.

Trent talks about the strategies out there for naming things. He makes specific mention of Atomic Design, which as Brad is always at pains to point out, is just one way of naming things: atoms, molecules, organisms, etc.

In some situations, having that pre-made vocabulary is perfect. In other situations, I’ve seen it cause all sorts of problems. It all depends on the project and the people.

Personally, I like the vocabulary to emerge from the domain knowledge of the people on the project. Building a newspaper website? Use journalism-related terms. Making a website about bicycles? Use bike-related terms.

Most importantly, make the naming process a collaborative exercise, as outlined by Alla and Charlotte.

Battling BEM – 5 common problems and how to avoid them

We tend to use a variant of BEM in our CSS at Clearleft. Glad to see that when we’ve hit these issues, we’ve taken the same approach.

“Content & Display Patterns,” an article by Dan Mall

A really terrific article from Dan on building pattern libraries. In summary:

1. Naming things is hard,
2. Separation of content and presentation is A Good Thing.

There are some really good insights here into getting just the right level of abstraction for a component—not too tightly tied to a specific visual display, but also not too tightly tied to a specific kind of content type:

When thinking about patterns, content strategists are primarily thinking about Content patterns, designers are primarily thinking about Display patterns, and front-end developers are responsible for bringing the two together.

(And it’s great to see Charlotte’s excellent article get a shout-out in the “Related reading” section at the end,)

Contextual Styling: UI Components, Nesting, and Implementation Detail by Harry Roberts

Smart thinking from Harry here on a common issue when it comes to naming and styling. As he points out, the solution is not technical, but lies in how you form your mental model:

The design issue here is solved by subtly inverting the problem.