Table of Contents for
Mastering PostCSS for Web Design

Version ebook / Retour

Cover image for bash Cookbook, 2nd Edition Mastering PostCSS for Web Design by Alex Libby Published by Packt Publishing, 2016
  1. Cover
  2. Table of Contents
  3. Mastering PostCSS for Web Design
  4. Mastering PostCSS for Web Design
  5. Credits
  6. About the Author
  7. About the Reviewer
  8. www.PacktPub.com
  9. Preface
  10. What you need for this book
  11. Who this book is for
  12. Conventions
  13. Reader feedback
  14. Customer support
  15. 1. Introducing PostCSS
  16. Introducing PostCSS
  17. Setting up a development environment
  18. Creating a simple example using PostCSS
  19. Linting code using plugins
  20. Exploring how PostCSS works
  21. Summary
  22. 2. Creating Variables and Mixins
  23. Creating a hover effect example
  24. Transitioning to using PostCSS
  25. Adding variable support to PostCSS
  26. Updating our hover effect demo
  27. Setting the order of plugins
  28. Creating mixins with PostCSS
  29. Looping content with PostCSS
  30. Summary
  31. 3. Nesting Rules
  32. Navigating through pages
  33. Transitioning to using PostCSS plugins
  34. Exploring the pitfalls of nesting
  35. Making the switch to BEM
  36. Exploring our changes in more detail
  37. Summary
  38. 4. Building Media Queries
  39. Exploring custom media queries in PostCSS
  40. Making images responsive
  41. Adding responsive text support
  42. Optimizing media queries
  43. Retrofitting support for older browsers
  44. Moving away from responsive design
  45. Taking things further with CSS4
  46. Summary
  47. 5. Managing Colors, Images, and Fonts
  48. Managing fonts with PostCSS
  49. Creating image sprites
  50. Working with SVG in PostCSS
  51. Adding support for WebP images
  52. Manipulating colors and color palettes
  53. Creating color functions with PostCSS
  54. Summary
  55. 6. Creating Grids
  56. Creating an example with Bourbon Neat
  57. Exploring the grid plugins in PostCSS
  58. Transitioning to using PostCSS-Neat
  59. Creating a site using Neat and PostCSS
  60. Adding responsive capabilities
  61. Summary
  62. 7. Animating Elements
  63. Moving away from jQuery
  64. Making use of pre-built libraries
  65. Switching to using SASS
  66. Making the switch to PostCSS
  67. Exploring plugin options within PostCSS
  68. Updating code to use PostCSS
  69. Creating a demo in PostCSS
  70. Optimizing our animations
  71. Using our own animation plugin
  72. Summary
  73. 8. Creating PostCSS Plugins
  74. Dissecting the architecture of a standard plugin
  75. Creating an transition plugin
  76. Building a custom font plugin
  77. Simplifying the development process
  78. Guidelines for plugin building
  79. Making the plugin available for use
  80. Summary
  81. 9. Working with Shortcuts, Fallbacks, and Packs
  82. Exploring plugin packs for PostCSS
  83. Adding shortcuts with Rucksack
  84. Linting and optimizing your code
  85. Providing fallback support
  86. Summary
  87. 10. Building a Custom Processor
  88. Exploring our processor
  89. Dissecting issues with our processor
  90. Optimizing the output
  91. Adding reload capabilities
  92. Extending our processor further
  93. Testing the final pre-processor
  94. Getting started with some hints and tips
  95. Introducing the CSStyle library
  96. Summary
  97. 11. Manipulating Custom Syntaxes
  98. Preparing our environment
  99. Implementing custom syntax plugins
  100. Parsing CSS
  101. Formatting the output with the API
  102. Highlighting our syntax code
  103. Summary
  104. 12. Mixing Preprocessors
  105. Exploring the conversion process
  106. Introducing the Pleeease library
  107. Compiling with other preprocessors
  108. Using the PreCSS library
  109. Converting a WordPress installation
  110. Setting up our environment
  111. Considering the conversion process
  112. Making changes to our code
  113. Compiling and testing the changes
  114. Summary
  115. 13. Troubleshooting PostCSS Issues
  116. Exploring some common issues
  117. Getting help from others
  118. Summary
  119. 14. Preparing for the Future
  120. Converting CSS4 styles for use
  121. Supporting future syntax with cssnext
  122. Creating plugins to provide extra CSS4 support
  123. Summary
  124. Index

Creating an example with Bourbon Neat

Constructing a site using Bourbon Neat is a simple process, it does not require any special markup on our web page; the effort is all within the compiled style sheet.

To prove this, we'll construct a simple web page that could easily be part of any website—I've used a Japanese theme as the basis for my page, but the principles we will use can apply to any site. You'll see that (with the exception of the standard SASS style of code used) there are only three instances where we have used Bourbon Neat-specific code.

Let's make a start:

  1. From the code download that accompanies this book, go ahead and extract a copy of Tutorial30, and save it to the root of our project area.
  2. Copy the contents of the sample site – pre-compile from within the Tutorial30 folder to the src folder within our project area. Go ahead and rename it as sample.scss.
  3. Next, fire up a Node.js command prompt, then change the working folder to our project area.
  4. At the prompt, enter gulp, then press Enter—Node.js will compile the code; if all is well, we should see two compiled style sheets and a source map in the dest folder.
  5. Go ahead and copy the contents of the dest folder into the css folder at the root of the Tutorial30 folder.

If we try previewing the results of our work, we should see a stylish page appear, with our Japanese theme:

Creating an example with Bourbon Neat

The demo covers a couple of key points and useful tricks, so let's dive in and work through them in more detail.

Exploring our demo in more detail

At this point, be surprised to hear that, our first tip is not directly related to SASS or even Bourbon Neat, but to the color scheme!

"Why", I hear you ask, "are we talking about the color scheme first?" There is a good reason for this: we've used variables to reference our colors, but could equally have used SASS functions to create the values. We've already covered this back in Chapter 5, Managing Colors, Images and Fonts, where we covered the use of the postcss-color-function plugin to build these values; we will use it again later in this chapter.

The real tip here, though, is using a nifty applet by Lokesh Dhakar, called Color Thief (hosted at http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/). We can simply drag and drop our header image in and get a full swatch of suitable colors:

Exploring our demo in more detail

The only downside is that it doesn't provide the color values; we can get these from the page's source instead.

Note

If your preference is to use RGB(A) colors instead, then a site such as Color Hexa (http://colorhexa.com) will be a great help.

The key to our demo is at lines 33, 63 and 69-these are Bourbon Neat mixins that control the format of the outer container (line 33):

Exploring our demo in more detail

They also control the format of each of the two content areas within (lines 63 and 69):

Exploring our demo in more detail

When compiled, the outer-container mixin adds a max-width of 72% to the .wrapper class controlling the main section, while the span-columns() mixins add float, display, width, and margin-right attributes to each element, like this:

Exploring our demo in more detail

In addition to the outer-container() and span-columns() mixins, the demo uses percentage values as much as possible, where rem or pixel values have been specified, then maintaining a cohesive design when resizing these elements is less critical.

We will, however, make some improvements later in this chapter, when we improve the responsive capabilities of our demo. For now, let's continue with our transition, and introduce the use of PostCSS plugins into our process.