About CSS
CSS was introduced in 1996 to improve web presentation capabilities. CSS is a powerful language but badly written CSS has a negative impact on browser performance. Some CSS properties, such as CSS Animations, are really powerful but can slow a browser to a crawl when used wrong.
When you write CSS for large projects this is a problem. It's essential to set up a design system to ensure it's expandable while staying confident that your codebase is maintainable and performant. If you don't plan ahead you end up with large, unwieldy stylesheets that become difficult to maintain. A common sign of this is having a lot of !important declarations in stylesheets to overwrite older code.
Maintainable CSS
Fortunately there are solutions to these pitfalls of CSS. Browser support has improved and CSS has evolved over the years and is now capable of much more than 20 years ago. CSS has enough features to build every layout possible.
With new features such a Flexbox, Grid and Custom Properties (CSS variables) it has become a lot easier to build and style complex interfaces in a sane and maintainable way.
Add to that things like Sass; a pre-processor language for CSS which can help enormously when dealing with complex stylesheets, and BEM; a methodology for efficient naming of HTML components.
With these tools and methods it becomes possible to set up a future-proof scalable system that you can continue to use with confidence.
Hire me for your project
I have been writing CSS for more than 15 years for websites, web applications and mobile websites. I advice and help companies with setting up maintainable and scalable CSS systems.
Contact me if you need a CSS solution!
