Variables though, I can't see how you can go without them. Being able to change 6 characters and have the entire site theme change for a client is great.
The point of variables is to allow the setting of one style property and applying it to others, right? So why not just to that at the top level element and inherit it down? Typically you only want to select a handful of colors for a web site / application so simply set those at the highest level possible then allow CSS inheritance to work.
Out of all of the big projects I've been on only one has used CSS preprocessors and I've never run into an issue with needing to change a value in too many places. It doesn't seem all that hard to avoid if I'm being honest here it just really, really depends on the structure of your CSS and HTML.
So first off if you want it to literally be the same then you could do something like:
h1, button {
color: #343434;
}
.primaryColor {
color: #343434;
}
But if you could break my first example apart and set it in two places just as easily. But that's setting it at a high level element itself. You could even go crazier and set EVERYTHING to that color but ultimately many of these decisions have to be context based to decide.
The way I see it, CSS preprocessors allow for code reuse via composition - vanilla CSS restricts you to inheritance.
The actual art of making visuals usable within a screen is pretty hard to make a language out of. With postcss and react css modules there are advancements. And still, it's one of the things that I have to put the least amount of effort in for the most amount of gain.
I already explained this? You set it at the top level. Have a set of top level HTML elements / classes that set all of these defaults. Then everything inherits from those. Only one place to change them.
Not quite: 'color', 'background-color' and 'border-color' are 3 separate properties that can't be be inherited from one place using vanilla CSS
I disagree - as a matter of fact, a lot of CSS frameworks have the concept of a "primary color" that is used in the manner I have described. Additionally,following your idea of DRY would render CSS variables pointless in CSS preprocessors as mixins cover that use-case (setting the same property).
But now your markup is littered with styling classes, and you could end up with a .secondary button with a .primaryColor class.
In vanilla css, the only way to really define something like a primary color just once and have it apply correctly to all elements is to define it at a high level in a deeply nested cascade. This of course all breaks as soon as you add a container element and have to go back and add another level of nesting to your css.
Variables in css should be standard.
I hate, hate, hate having to alter my HTML to apply styles. The idea of
<h1 class="primaryColor">
totally creeps me out. I do it because other people refuse to use preprocessors and think that altering the HTML to include presentational details is fine (see Bootstrap.)
But it still feels gross to me.
To be fair HTML is the presentation. I can understand not wanting to mix business logic from JavaScript into a page but CSS is just the other half of HTML.
If it makes it nicer you could use more generic class terms (such as page information or HTML structure location, etc).
HTML is the content and description of content. You put a <strong> tag around text to make it strong emphasis.
CSS is the presentation. Your browser sees the <strong> tag and applies its default style of making it bold.
This is just incredibly pedantic. For all practical purposes HTML + CSS is the presentation. Toss JavaScript into that if you want. Front-end work is the presentation.
As far as graceful degradation, If I open a properly built page in a text-only browser, there are no styles. There's no real emphasis or bolding. There's just text. Because CSS didn't exist.
Now, if you want to live in the early part of the decade when it was OK to put inline styles and background colors in your HTML, that's fine. But the world evolved beyond that. HTML with <body bgcolor" is deprecated.
Because HTML is the content. CSS is how it looks. And JS is how it works.
int one = 2;However, I've seen projects with a few CSS variables defining the base colours for their scheme and perhaps some tints and shades, and then a second layer of variables defined in terms of the base ones but with more role-based names like heading text colours and focused primary button backgrounds and so on. It's a simple, practical model that has proved very easy to work with and in some cases has stood the test of time for quite a few years now.
Have you never A/B tested a site and found that varying colours made a difference?
Have you never developed a site with some colour scheme and later found you needed to extend the colour scheme, perhaps to incorporate a new product or service being added to the available range?
Having a colour scheme that is set in stone early on sounds like one of those idealised things that sometimes just doesn't work in the face of reality.
I'm currently building something that has mild themes for fonts, colors and some margins (and is build on top of a SCSS framework, but that wasn't my choice), without color variables it would be a pain...
It can be a copy-paste tool on the internet or whatever, no preprocessor or build tools required. You work directly with styles.css3 in the browser and when you're done you transform it to old style without variables, so it works in older browsers.
That's what I wanted to do last week but as I couldn't find such a tool, at the end I did a search/replace. It was a small project obviously.
And the OP uses PostCSS. Apparently, a lot of people here didn't read that part...
So...a preprocessor? :)