Description:

How do you scale CSS for millions of visitors or thousands of pages? What happens to the size of your CSS file as more pages and modules are added? The answer, for most sites, is that it grows out of control and becomes an unmaintainable tangle of spaghetti code. Perhaps more importantly, our sites are too brittle and require guru-level abilities to make even simple changes.

CSS is a powerful, beautiful, and expressive language, but deeply misunderstood and often poorly written. Now is exactly the right moment for it to get a dose of software engineering best practices. Object Oriented CSS allows you to write fast, maintainable, standards-based front-end code. It adds much needed predictability to CSS so that even beginners can create beautiful websites. OOCSS is not a framework or a tool (though in this session Nicole will demo both), it is a better, saner way to write and maintain style sheets.

In this session, Nicole will demonstrate how to build templates, grids, modules, and other objects. After attending, you will be able to:

• Apply programming best practices to style sheets
• Extend CSS objects to create unique skins
• Calculate complexity, use mixins, and avoid singletons (yup, all CSS)
• Model design patterns in UML
• Take advantage of the cascade (rather than letting it take advantage of you!)