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

Chapter 11. Manipulating Custom Syntaxes

Although many developers have moved on from using preprocessors to using PostCSS, it is important to note that PostCSS is not a replacement, just an alternative way of preprocessing CSS styles. To help with the transition, we're not forced to learn a new syntax. Using a handful of plugins, we can take advantage of the speed of PostCSS, while still using syntaxes that we're accustomed to, such as Less, SASS, or Stylus.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at the plugins that make this possible, and work on some simple examples that show you how using a custom syntax that we're all familiar with is still possible when using PostCSS.

This chapter will cover the following technical topics:

  • Introducing custom syntaxes
  • Implementing examples of custom syntax plugins
  • Parsing CSS
  • Converting content to strings with the API
  • Adding highlighting support to our code

Let's make a start!

Introducing custom syntaxes

W3Schools defines a CSS syntax as follows:

"A CSS rule-set consists of a selector and a declaration block: The selector points to the HTML element you want to style. The declaration block contains one or more declarations separated by semicolons."

We as developers spend many hours crafting sites; this can be something small as a one-page contact card-type site, right through to a large e-commerce website. It does not matter which styles we decide to use, or how we get there: the key is that the final result must use the same standard syntax that we've grown to love over the years.

This does not mean to say that our source should be standard CSS, in fact, it would be very restrictive if this were the only option! We could use libraries such as SASS or Less, but instead, how about using the API and custom syntax plugins to manipulate our styles directly? We touched on some of the principles back in Chapter 8, Creating PostCSS Plugins; it's time to revisit this and explore how we can begin to remove this restriction.

Why would we want to do this, I hear you ask? The answer's simple—let's assume for a moment you create themes for WordPress. WordPress' default themes are created using SASS (and PostCSS); this means a dependency on SASS in some form. We can mitigate this a little by using the gulp-sass plugin, but this still uses libsass to compile code.

What if we could turn this on its head, and use the API and custom syntax plugins that parses SASS code and converts it to PostCSS equivalent? Okay, granted, we may not be able to cover all styles; we can at least make a start on converting some, and reduce our dependency on using SASS. Let's make a start. Before we get stuck into producing code, we have a simple administrative task to perform: we need to install a syntax highlighter first.