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Styleable

# By Chris Coyier

The Wix dev team throws their hat into the CSS preprocessor ring:

Stylable is a CSS preprocessor that enables you to write reusable, highly-performant, styled components. Each component exposes a style API that maps its internal parts so you can reuse components across teams without sacrificing stylability.

  • Scopes styles to components so they don’t “leak” and clash with other styles.
  • Enables custom pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements that abstract the internal structure of a component. These can then be styled externally.
  • Uses themes so you can apply different look and feel across your web application.

At build time, the preprocessor converts the Stylable CSS into flat, static, valid, vanilla CSS that works cross-browser.

Looks like Sass luminary Chris Eppstein is getting in on the game of scoped styles with the not-yet-released CSS Blocks. And think of Vue's support for <style scoped>, and the popularity of utility libraries. I think scoped styles might be the hottest CSS topic in 2018.

The Options for Programmatically Documenting CSS

# By Kaloyan Kosev

I strongly believe that the documentation should be kept as close to the code as possible. Based on my experience, that's the only option that works well in the long term. External documents, notes, and wikis all eventually get outdated, forgotten, and lost.

Documentation is a topic that always bugs me. Working on poorly documented codebase is a ticking bomb. It makes the onboarding process a tedious experience. Another way to think of bad documentation is that it helps foster a low truck factor (that is, "the number of people on your team who have to be hit by a truck before the project is in serious trouble").

Recently I was on-boarded into a project with more than 1,500 pages of documentation written in… Microsoft Word. It was outdated and unorganized. A real disaster. There must be a better way!

I've talked about this documentation issue before. I scratched the surface not long ago here on CSS-Tricks in my article What Does a Well-Documented CSS Codebase Look Like? Now, let's drill down into the options for programmatically documenting code. Specifically CSS.

(more…)

Introducing iframify

# By Robin Rendle

Hugo Giraudel writes up why he created iframify, a script which grabs a DOM node and wraps it in an <iframe>. It’s a nifty tool for displaying components in a style guide at a certain width and effectively faking element queries.

An iframe being an inner document, media queries fire based on the width of the iframe rather than on the actual screen size. Which is what we want. Yay!

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