This is what I want my gem to do...once included in a Rails gem file, it will allow the developer to specify which stylesheet is the main, and which is a 'secondary'. The idea being, that all the styles in the first stylesheet take precedence over all the others - but when a style does not exist in the main, it uses the ones in secondary.
For instance, if there is body in main.css and in secondary.css, it always uses the style from main.css. But if there is alert-message in secondary.css, but not in main, the developer can use alert-message, without any fear of conflicts.
The idea basically is to allow you to leverage existing frameworks or minified stylesheets that might have classes that clash with your main.css without having to worry that your entire site/app will be messed up.
It would be awesome if I could get a general overview of the entire Rails/Ruby gem creating process - as this would be my first. Then maybe some discussions about how I might go about solving this particular problem (from a high-level is fine).
I imagine that it would require a lot of work. You'd have to extend (or write your own) CSS parser. Or come up with another way of specifying which classes are "main".
I think, the solution is much less complicated. Simply include your "main" stylesheet after all "secondaries". That'll overwrite the classes, if there are conflicts.
Related
I work with front-end designers that give me a bunch of HTML & CSS files. There are some things that are very straight forward - like CSS for Twitter Bootstrap or any other framework.
But when the designer has created a bunch of other stylesheets, should I just include them in the stylesheets directory or should I just copy all the styles to the main application.css file?
Is this just a matter of style or does my approach really (or not) matter with the asset pipeline?
Thanks.
The approach doesn't usually matter, but it can matter if you do not want to include everything in one stylesheet link on the final page. I'd strongly recommend keeping the stylesheets separated for the same reason you keep code separated. Easier maintenance, less conceptual overhead per file, and easier to find where to make the change you need to make.
Even though they get combined by the asset pipeline, I tend to do one stylesheet per controller, or component, with certain shared styles (navigation, forms, common UI forms) in their own file. I haven't found the perfect solution yet (I still struggle with wanting "DRYer" stylesheets), but this works pretty well.
application.css is ment to organize css file, i remember there are comments on the top of the application.css telling not to directly write css file inside it. You should create a new css file for those style-sheet content your front-end guy gave you. And as application.css will include all the files under the stylestheet folder automatically. It will work.
I need to take a database text field and parse it for
duplication and garbage
malice
whitelisted selectors
compress and output as a css file
Since there might be a rails way I'm unaware or something ready made I'm asking before I waste time trying to reinvent a wheel. My searching revealed nothing, mostly in rails seems aimed at view level, and css seems to be an unattended niche in this area (plenty of html though).
I'm aware of the sanitize gem (doesn't do css immediately, yet another thing I'd need to map out and code) and the built in rails stuff (not a lot of tutorial, aimed mostly at the view level). I need a gem, lib, module or something similar that I can work with in a controller or queue.
EDIT:
Without getting too deep into the specifics of the project: administrative users can add css for their portions of the site. As part of the flow I'm going to save the raw css and then process and save the processed css. The db stuff is archival mostly, the css file is output immediately. Because there is few places to add modified css and only admins have access to the css, it sort of works but I'm looking to make it more robust in the future where admins who may not be as conversant with the security needs or not as css aware can operate.
The most basic example is that it just a text field on an admin page. The admin cuts and pastes css there, submits, and the application turns it into a css file that gets included with the designated pages, which works because the current admins know the application, the css of the application, and what they can and cannot change. The goal is to make this more robust for future admins who might not be as savvy.
To simply sanitize CSS, you can use the SanitizeHelper built into Rails: http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionView/Helpers/SanitizeHelper.html#method-i-sanitize_css
Have you looked at Sass? It has all of the parsing logic built in, for a superset of CSS. You could add a feature (Sass support) and save yourself the need to parse/validate the CSS all in one go.
You can generate output CSS from Sass (or just plain CSS, since Sass [with the SCSS syntax] is a fully-backward-compatible superset of CSS) like this:
output_css = Sass::Engine.new(sass_content, :syntax => :scss).render
There are a bunch of options that you'll probably want to look into at http://sass-lang.com/
Another option is Less. The new Twitter Bootstrap framework uses Less, and Rails 3.1 uses Sass. The biggest difference is that the official Less parser/compiler is built in JavaScript, so you could actually validate and compile in the user's browser while they work and show them any errors before they save. Of course then you need to run a JavaScript engine (e.g. V8) in your Rails application if you want to use Less to validate the incoming CSS still.
Note: This question refers to a Rails project with Sass & Compass.
Using the Rails Asset Pipeline? Then have a look at this question.
We are developing a big application with many use cases and many individually styled pages, partly for multiple contexts. Which simply means a lot of style information.
With the newest section of our application, we have broken Internet Explorer's limit of 4095 selectors per stylesheet. (Want a proof of this limitation? http://marc.baffl.co.uk/browser_bugs/css-selector-limit/)
Okay. So, why do we not simply split the application style sheet into multiple ones by design?
Well, mixins and selector inheritance will not work across multiple Sass files (not partials), right?
I'd say the quality of the stylesheets is rather good, we cannot optimize away the exceeding amount of selectors. (There is rather more to come.)
I also believe that minimizing the amount of selectors should not be our primary optimization goal. The Sass core team advises to use selector inheritance instead of mixins where applicable in order to save CSS file size. By doing so, the number of selectors tends to grow though.
So what should I do?
I am thinking about writing a script that generates additional css files, partitioning my big application.css file. These would only be loaded in IE then (so that I don't have multiple requests in modern browsers).
I would need a simple css parser for that in order to cut the application.css file after max. 4095 selectors at a valid position.
And I would need an compass compile - after hook so that developers don't need to generate the IE files by hand in order to test it.
Please, tell me, that you got a better idea!
Best,
Christian
Mixins are usable across multiple files. However, it is logically not possible that #extend may work with multiple files. It is the purpose of this directive to result in a single rule
(which should not be duplicated across multiple files). Therefore, I cannot split up files.
Thus, I implemented a splitter: https://gist.github.com/1131536
After these two commits have found their way into Sass and Compass, you can use the following hook in your Rails config/compass.rb in order to automatically create the additional stylesheets for IE:
on_stylesheet_saved do |filename|
if File.exists?(filename)
CssSplitter.split(filename)
end
end
Update:
The CssSplitter mentionend above has been release as a gem: https://github.com/zweilove/css_splitter
If you can't reduce the number of selectors, there is no choice other than to split the CSS file.
Your proposed solution for doing so already sounds optimal, if a little complicated to implement.
An easy way to do it is http://blesscss.com/.
Simply :
install node.js
Execute npm install bless -g
blessc source.css output.css
I would like to know what are the best ways to organise CSS code in Rails project?
I'm interested in how you do it and why.
If you would like to break up your css into multiple files during development you can add cache => true to stylesheet_link_tag and rails will automatically concatenate them into a single file in production. This also works for javascript_include_tag.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/layouts_and_rendering.html#linking-to-javascript-files-with-javascript_include_tag
Generally, you should not have the client download a massive amount of CSS snippets, but pack them into a single file on the server to avoid rendering latencies. So you have the tradeoff of having functionality divided up into multiple files put wanting to send only one file to the client.
You could use SASS to have each piece of code inside a single include file and just include all of them together. This gives you the added advantage of mixins (kind of like macros) and variables among other awesome things.
Another possibility would be to use plain CSS and use something like Jammit to pack the stuff up to send to the client.
Regarding actual setups, I tend to have one file resetting the styles to a known default, a file for the basic layout (columns, default spaces, ...), and one file each for each area of concern for your specific design (headers, buttons, ...)
James and Holger's answers are very good.
Besides organizing CSS in my projects, I also had to change colour schemes a couple of times..
Trying to do consistent changes throughout many CSS files can be pretty painful (results may vary).
I ended up extending the Rails start-up procedure a little, to include a custom module "site_settings.rb"
through which I can define variable for colors and other CSS attributes, which I can then use throughout my CSS input files.
Whenever Rails starts up, and one of the input files has changed, it auto-generates the CSS files.
http://unixgods.org/~tilo/Ruby/Using_Variables_in_CSS_Files_with_Ruby_on_Rails.html
Since Rails 3.1 is out and sprockets replaced Jammit, here an excerpt form the Rails guides concerning the asset organization:
Asset Organization
Assets can be placed inside an application in one of three locations: app/assets, lib/assets or vendor/assets.
app/assets is for assets that are owned by the application, such as custom images, JavaScript files or stylesheets.
lib/assets is for your own libraries’ code that doesn’t really fit into the scope of the application or those libraries which are shared across applications.
vendor/assets is for assets that are owned by outside entities, such as code for JavaScript plugins.
I've got some experience using haml (+sass) on rails projects. I recently started using them with blueprintcss - the only thing I did was transform blueprint.css into a sass file, and started coding from there. I even have a rails generator that includes all this by default.
It seems that Compass does what I do, and other things. I'm trying to understand what those other things are - but the documentation/tutorials weren't very clear.
These are my conclusions:
Compass comes with built-in sass mixins that implement common CSS idioms, such as links with icons or horizontal lists. My solution doesn't provide anything like that. (1 point for Compass).
Compass has several command-line options: you can create a rails project, but you can also "install" it on an existing rails project. A rails generator could be personalized to do the same thing, I guess. (Tie).
Compass has two modes of working with blueprint: "basic" and "semantic" usage. I'm not clear about the differences between those. With my rails generator I only have one mode, but it seems enough. (Tie)
Apparently, Compass is prepared to use other frameworks, besides blueprint (e.g. YUI). I could not find much documentation about this, and I'm not interested on it anyway - blueprint is ok for me (Tie).
Compass' learning curve seems a bit stiff and the documentation seems sparse. Learning could be a bit difficult. On the other hand, I know the ins and outs of my own system and can use it right away. (1 point for my system).
With this analysis, I'm hesitant to give Compass a try.
Is my analysis correct? Are Am I missing any key points, or have I evaluated any of these points wrongly?
The ideal goal is separation of style and content: it's not always possible 100%, but it can be done reasonably well by using semantic markup. Blueprint and other CSS frameworks utterly fail at this.
The original idea behind Compass was to avoid polluting HTML with the visual markup that Blueprint generates: if you're writing class="column-4" in your markup, then you might as well put style="width:160px" in there instead. Semantically it's the same meaning, and the same amount of repetition to maintain.
Compass turns a Blueprint class like .column-4 into a mixin which you can apply to a meaningful selector:
#sidebar
+column(4)
This way, you only need to maintain it in the stylesheet, not across a number of templates and HTML files.
Compass is project-aware. It will handle compiling your whole tree of stylesheets, even automatically on save when you run compass watch.
There are some very helpful functions provided by compass, for example:
image_url is a configurable function that can handle relative or absolute paths or even set up rotating asset hosts if you need to.
The CSS3 module takes care of all the browser-specific style rules for rounded corners, shadows, etc.
General utilities provide helpers for the stuff you do all the time, but with less repetition (especially for the cross-browser issues). These are some basic ones I use a lot:
+clearfix and +pie-clearfix (cross-browser clearing methods)
+float ensures you don't forget display:inline in front of it for IE... (if the time comes to drop the old IEs, it's one single change.)
+replace-text hides text and positions an image replacement background.
+hover-link adds the :hover underline rule to a base link style
You can check these out on the new docs site for Compass.
Then, Compass provides the facilities for a number of other style frameworks in addition to the built-in Blueprint. Do check out Susy for example, which is a Sass-native layout framework, not just a CSS port. It specializes in flexible and fluid grids.
'Semantic mode' refers to the possibility to use more semantic class names than the ones css frameworks ship with: .article vs .grid_1. which i personally think is a big +.
I'm not sure if these resources have only shown up recently, but have you seen the Compass CSS3 helpers and the General utilities - (both well documented in my opinion) - they've really sped up my interface builds a great deal.
Another great resource is the Compass plugins page.
Personally I like to copy these utility Sass files out the rubygem and manually include them in my project's Sass files as it feels pretty weird referencing Sass which is stored out of the project.
Compass looked like a great solution for me as well, but after trying it on a project I didn't really see the great advantage of using it for me. Like you, I'm just fine with blueprint, and I didn't see the need to add yet another layer on top of haml/sass.
I eventually stripped the compass from that project and just go with a sass version of the blueprint CSS files, and go from there. I store any custom/additional styles in a separate sass file and that's it. No need for compass or anything like that if you just want to keep it simple.