Germany’s energy network nearly broken down in January because of poor execution from wind turbines and sun based boards, as indicated by information from a noteworthy exchange union. Wind and sunlight based power plants failed to meet expectations in January, 2017, as a result of shady climate with almost no wind, setting the phase for …

The post Germany Facing Mass Blackouts Because The Wind And Solar Won’t Cooperate appeared first on LatestSolarNews.

The future is solar LED lights. You will see them in the parking lots and other large areas around a city. They are cheap and save a good deal of money on electricity bills. Nowadays, the majority of parking lots feature the conventional lights that get their power from the grid. These products are not …

The post 4 Benefits Of Solar LED Lights For Parking Lots appeared first on LatestSolarNews.

India is planning to achieve 50 gigawatt (GW) of production from renewable energy by 2028, in order to get to its goal of 40 per cent of electricity generation from non-fossil fuels by 2030, Ministry of New and Renewable Energy secretary, Anand Kumar said at the India-Norway Business Summit 2019 in New Delhi. Of this …

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At some point, while working on the MontageJS framework, the question came up what CSS naming convention we should start using. After a long discussion we settled on using the BEM methodology, but changed the syntax a bit. To keep this post short, I won’t go into detail why using BEM is a good idea, but rather explain why we chose a different syntax. Here some examples:

.digit-Progress          /* org-Component */
.digit-Progress-bar      /* org-Component-childElement */
.digit-Progress--small   /* org-Component--variation */

Note: The org- (digit-) prefix is used as a name-space so it wouldn’t conflict with other packages/libraries/frameworks.

Now let’s take a look at the reasons for choosing such a syntax.

Hyphens (-)

The main reason why we’re using a hyphen (-) instead of underscores (_), has to do with the fact that their behavior is different when double-clicking to select text. Try for yourself:

component__element /* underscores */
component-element  /* hyphen */

See how when you’re using underscores it selects the part before and after, in this case the whole component__element. But with hyphens it let’s you select only the part you double-clicked. component OR element. This let’s you quickly edit only the parts you want:

camelCase

Now, what if the component or child element consists of multiple words? We could use underscores like component_name-element_name. It would still be double-clickable, but readability suffers since it’s harder to see what belongs together. Better to use camelCase which groups each part visually: componentName-elementName.

MainComponent

OK, I think we’re getting closer. As a last rule, for the “main” component we use PascalCase. The reason for it is to add emphasis and make it easier to distinguish the main component from a child element. Also when using a namespace, the component moves to the second position, which makes it even more important to have it stick out: org-Component-childElement

–variation

We kept the more commonly used double hyphens (–) for variations. digit-Progress--small. It makes sense, because it pulls the variation (–small) visually more apart and makes it look like it’s something “different” than the default component.

So that’s about it. For more details about this naming convention, take a look at the SUIT framework, which also started to use the same syntax and documented it really well.

In the end, whatever Shade of BEM you choose to cook with probably depends on your personal taste, but thinking about a great UX by improving usability and readability won’t hurt either.

The cascade in CSS is a curse and blessing at the same time. It usually works quite well, but there are issues that let people get all worked up and ask the question Do We Even Need CSS Anymore. I can somewhat relate to that - but I also think it’s not the cascade alone and also about fighting specificity. Not running into issues with specificity is hard. Almost as hard as pronouncing that word.

In this post I’ll try to show a few ways how you can make the cascade be your friend and maybe reduce the need of overriding and thus encounter less fighting with specificity.

Tip 1:

For every CSS property that you write, try to move it up the tree as far as possible. In other words: Back to the :root.

For example, our site has a side bar and we want to add a short bio to it. The markup might look something like this:

<body>
	<main class=“Posts”>
	<aside class=“SideBar”>
		<nav class=“Nav”>
		<p class=“Bio”>

And the CSS:

.Bio {
	font-size: .8em;
	line-height: 1.5;
	color: #888;
}

That would work. But if we look at the Nav that is already in the SideBar, chances are good that some of the styles are the same. In our case it’s font-size and color. So let’s remove those properties from Nav and Bio and add it to the shared parent element, the SideBar.

.SideBar {
	font-size: .8em;
	color: #888;
}

And as it turns out, that line-height: 1.5; is already defined for our Posts. So since it seems that the whole page uses the same line-height, let’s remove it from the Bio and Post elements and move it all up to the root node.

:root {
	line-height: 1.5;
}

This probably sounds like common sense, but often it’s tempting to just style your new thing without even looking if some of the sibling elements define the same thing. This also happens when you copy&paste styles from another section or when pasting some snippets you found online. It might take a bit more time to refactor and seems scary, but it should keep our CSS in a healthier state.

Style the branches, not each leaf

Tip 2:

Style certain properties always as a combo.

A good example is the color and background-color combo. Unless you make only small tweaks, it’s probably a good idea to always change them together. When adding a background color to an element, it might not contain any text, but probably some child will. Therefore if we set foreground and background color together, we can always be sure we won’t run into any legibility and contrast issues. Also, next time we change a background color, we don’t have to hunt for all the text colors that need to be changed too, it’s right there in the same place.

Screenshot from Colorable

Tip 3:

Use “dynamic” values, such as currentColor and ems.

Sometimes it might make sense to use the text color for other properties. Like for border, box-shadow or for the fill of SVG icons. Instead of defining them directly you can use currentColor and it will be the same the color property. And since color inherits by default, you might can change it in only one place.

Similarly ems are mapped to font-size allowing you to scale everything by just changing the :root font size.

Here a few more details on currentColor and EMs.

Tip 4:

Override UA Styles to inherit from its parents.

Form controls like buttons, inputs get styled by the browser in a certain way. Overriding them with inherit makes them adapt to your own styles.

button,
input,
select,
textarea {
	color: inherit;
	font-family: inherit;
	font-style: inherit;
	font-weight: inherit;
}

The example above is taken from sanitize.css. normalize.css does the same, so if you use them, you’re already covered.

You can also try to restyle other inputs like a range slider, radio, checkbox etc. And as seen above, by using currentColor, make them automatically match the color property. And maybe move them from a light into a dark theme without changing anything.

Conclusion

That’s all nice stuff, but who is it for? Well, of course it can’t be forced upon every situation. I would say small and simple web sites benefit the most. But even when using a preprocessor, it might not hurt if it reduces the amount of CSS that gets output or when a few variables aren’t even needed.

Also it seems suited for the “single purpose class” approach like Tachyons. It might reduce complexity and the amount of classes that are needed.

Another interesting thing could be the upcoming custom properties a.k.a. CSS variables. Unlike variables in preprocessors, when overriding a custom property, it will only affect the current selector scope. So in a sense they will be “cascading variables”. But I still have to try that out and see how it works in practice.

ps. It is possible that this post is inspired by this tweet.

Although life hasn’t returned to normal yet, the web design and marketing space doesn’t seem to have been too badly disrupted — at least not with all the new research and surveys floating around. And thank goodness for that. If we can maintain some semblance of normalcy, I think we’ll all get through this crisis in good shape.

One of the struggles that marketers face is how to send the right message at exactly the right time to target people in a way that will appeal to them. To solve the problem, businesses need to get themselves acquainted with new technologies and the power of personalization. In the past few years, digital marketing […]

Content Management Systems are arguably the internet’s most powerful web development tool. In a rapidly growing market where every business under the sun requires a website that is not only fully functioning, but optimised, easy to update regularly, and implement the latest features, the right CMS is important. As a web developer it can be […]

The first global pandemic of the digital era is upon us. We’re living in unprecedented and uncomfortable times. For our senior citizens, these past several weeks have been particularly discomforting. According to the CDC, men and women over the age of 65 are significantly more likely to develop complications from COVID-19. As we seek to […]

State units can take part across age-groups

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