Stubbornella - Nicole Sullivan

Styling headings is either a deceptively complex problem, or maybe the design of CSS made it appear complex when it need not have done.

When styling headings (or really anything) we want three big goals to be met:

1. DRY – Do not repeat yourself. We want to set headings once and never (ok, rarely!) repeat those font styles or selectors. This will make our site easier to maintain.
2. Predictable – The heading should look the same no matter where on the page it is placed. This will make creating new pages and content easier.
3. Keep specificity low and selectors as simple as possible. This will help with performance and keep the site from growing more and more tangled over time.

The html5 section tag is weird. It dramatically changes the way we use headings in the HTML. It also changes the way browsers and assistive technologies are meant to interpret those headings. For that reason, we’ve got to revisit how we style headings. The old way simply won’t work anymore!

It is a subtle difference, but section elements are meant to help the browser figure out what level the heading really is, but not necessarily to decide how to style it. By tying styles to browser heading level interpretation, developers (trying to implement html5 from the spec) are ending up with selectors that look like this:

h1{font-size: 36px}
section h1{font-size: 28px}
section section h1{font-size: 22px}
section section section h1{font-size: 18px}
section section section section h1{font-size: 16px}
section section section section section h1{font-size: 14px}
section section section section section section h1{font-size: 13px}
section section section section section section section h1{font-size: 11px}

Learn how this can go awry and a better way of styling headings.

Nicholas Zakas and I spoke at Velocity a few minutes ago. First we talked about CSS 3 and it’s impact on performance, then we demoed and open sourced CSS Lint! I really couldn’t be more excited (or relieved, I was super duper nervous before this presentation).

CSS Lint is a tool to help point out problems with your CSS code. It does basic syntax checking as well as applying a set of rules to the code that look for problematic patterns or signs of inefficiency. The rules are all pluggable, so you can easily write your own or omit ones you don’t want.

I was prepping to speak at Webstock this year when I realized I didn’t want to give the talk I had proposed. I didn’t want to talk about the Mistakes of Massive CSS, because I realized it went deeper than that. In fact, in most cases, the things we considered best practices were leading to the bad outcomes we sought to avoid. I realized (unpopular though it might be), that we couldn’t make it work out well by trying harder. Each time we start a new project, we think “this time, I’m going to keep the code clean. This time the project will be a shining example of what can be done with CSS.” And without fail, over time, as more content and features are added to the site, the code becomes a spaghetti tangle of duplication and unpredictability.

It is time to let ourselves off the hook. There is nothing we could have done by trying harder. There is no magic juju that some other developer has that we don’t. Following our beloved best practices leads to bad outcomes every. single. time.

What are those flawed best practices?

• Classitis!
• Never add an non-semantic element
• Or, a non-semantic class
• Use descendant selectors exclusively

Here is the video of my talk at Webstock 2011.

CSS 3 is full of ways to reduce our dependence on background images, one of which is pure CSS gradients. They have several features, which I’m sure designers are salivating over, like multiple color stops, and angled, radial, and linear gradients. Many people had built cool designer-focused tools to make interacting with a somewhat confusing gradient syntax a little easier. The issue for me has been that I’m not a designer. I generally work off of photoshop comps or (when doing big re-architecture projects) the site itself, as if the old version were a design. This means that, for the most part, I was trying desperately to match CSS gradients to an image with zero information about how that image would have been created. Because of my focus on fixing old and broken CSS, the original designer may not even still work at the company.

If you don’t know what I mean, picture me with a color picker going pixel by pixel to try to figure out by hand where the color stops should be and what colors I should use versus extrapolate. Then, for each version, making an image of the gradient I’ve created, blowing it up so I can compare it to the image of the original. Rinse, repeat until I’ve come up with something that kinda, sorta approximates the original. Oh yeah, painful.

Interested in Performance and scaling sites to a large number of visitors or pages? I just realized both Steve Souders and I will be giving talks at Webstock next week! This is a pretty amazing opportunity to massively increase your Performance mojo in one go.

I’m going to be hosting a workshop in which you will learn to build your own site using OOCSS techniques. By the time you leave you will have the skills necessary to write efficient, scalable CSS. You’ll understand the joy and pain of CSS3 and HTML5, and be ready to go build the next generation of websites and web apps.

Steve’s workshop is filled with Mobile yummy goodness. How do you figure out that your mobile app is slow before your clients start complaining? What’s even going on in there? In his workshop, Steve is going to open up the mobile black-box and teach you to take a peek inside.

I am super excited about Webstock, even more so now that I found out it will be a perf-geek-meet-up. New Zealand here I come!

Everyone keeps asking me what is with all the “x” in the OOCSS grids… so I finally wrote an article. The short answer is that it isn’t just a clearfix (it does that too), but it also causes the element to stretch wide, even when it has very little content. It is a bit of magic that allows us to use display table-cell to create a new formatting context in all browsers. It also allows us to solve sub-pixel rounding errors without resorting to fixed widths. (This has all kinds of great perf benefits because the grids are nestable and stackable).

  content:" x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x ";
}

Multitasking has been stressing me, robbing me of my focus, my productivity, and my appreciation of the beauty of the exact moment I’m experiencing right now, and dammit, I want my brain back!

Once upon a time, I was assigned 21 projects in my first month on a job. Distinct projects, working with different groups of people on completely different tasks. I went from writing code 95% of the time to running from meeting to meeting.

At the same time, I installed IM at work and didn’t create a separate work account (I can see this clearly now, but at the time, I was just filling out my HR profile, I didn’t see the significance). The lines became blurry and I started to get pings around the clock from both work and friends. This is in part due to “crazy-round-world-syndrome”. My life is international, that’s okay, but it does make boundaries harder.

Perhaps it really began as early as 2000, when I got my first cell phone and lived with it glued to my ear? Getting an iphone in January of 2007 certainly made it worse because as a device my precious is meant to be petted, not simply used to accomplish other tasks more efficiently.

So what does a good geek do? Gather data.

I gathered data from scientific american, psychology today, read research papers, took a mindfullness course, and read links that friends posted to twitter.

Last week, Stoyan Stefanov and I spoke at Velocity Conference about optimizing massive CSS. We talked about our experiences optimizing large-scale sites like Facebook and Yahoo!, and we discussed our findings regarding the CSS efficiency of the Alexa Top 1000 websites.

Velocity was kind enough to share videos of the session.

What is the state of the internet regarding CSS performance? Kind of sad. We aren’t getting a lot of the basics right, and when we look at the more advanced techniques, there are some spectacular examples of what-not-to-do. Why do we care about CSS performance? As Stoyan talks about in the beginning of the video, it blocks progressive rendering and it is very difficult to auto-minify.

What is the internet made of? At least the UI layer is mainly composed of media blocks. I talked about the Facebook stream story before, and all the tiny objects of which it is composed. For the most part, the stream story is made up of the media object repeated over and over.

The media object is an image to the left, with descriptive content to the right, like this Facebook story:

It is a very simple object, but it is very powerful. We can eliminate many lines of code abstracting this repeating pattern. The code for the media block and many other “web Lego” are available on the Object Oriented CSS open source project.