Harry is an award-winning Consultant Front-end Architect, designer, developer, writer and speaker from the UK. He writes, tweets, speaks and shares code about authoring and scaling CSS for big websites.
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Hey all!
I’ve had a bunch of fun answering everyone’s questions! There’ve been some really good ones, thank you :)
If I didn’t answer your question quite correctly, or you’d like a little more detail, please feel free to ping me an email and we can discuss things further there: csswizardry@gmail.com
For anything shorter form, you can just fire me a tweet: @csswizardry
I hope you all enjoy the rest of your days, wherever you are in the world. Thanks for having me!
If we’re ever at an event together, come say hi and let’s grab a beer!
H
I've written a CSS toolkit following your teachings - BEM and ITCSS (http://blazecss.com)
Since ITCSS and BEMIT are popular, how do you go about promoting your work? Any tips you could give us?
Have you come across !important soup in any of the code bases you ever looked at? Do you have guidelines on when and when not to use it? "!important everything" meme cracks me up :D
Hi Harry,
We've be working in-house with ITCSS and Inuit for bit now. How do you reconcile certain philosophical conflicts between the two?
Examples:
Many thanks for the AMA!
Hi Harry,
What is your opinion on normalising CSS? Is there still a need for this?
Hey Harry! thanks for hosting the AMA...
We had to wait for a long time for the flexbox spec to be implemented.. What are some useful(and overlooked) specs that you think should to be implement soon?
On recent project I split up CSS into multiple files in which there were chunks of layout (e. q. base, header, main, footer..), which were loaded asynchronously after each chunk's HTML so that the page loads/displays it's bits before whole page finishes loading while preventing FOUC. Is this considered good practice at the cost of more HTTP requests?
Hey Harry, big fan of your work!
I'm wondering, what's your take on creating and especially maintaining a style guide?
Any thoughts on deeper design systems like Rizzo from Lonely Planet, who kinda works as an API for production and their style guide?
Thanks!
Has there ever been a codebase you've consulted at where rewriting (at least parts) has been the best course of action?
Hi Harry, I've followed your work since becoming a front end developer and it's shaped me into the developer I am today. Thanks! What are your plans for http://inuitcss.com/ and http://itcss.io/ ?
Many times we associate front-end development only to the use of HTML, CSS and JS but going a step back, we have the UI/UX and Web Design.
As front-end developer/architect what do you think do both work at same time, is really necessary?
Do you still prefer to use Sass or would recommend PostCSS now?
Would like to know your thoughts on CSS-Modules and leveraging it with ITCSS https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules
What is missed in W3C specs for enterprise-level CSS architecture?
Hi Harry, how are you? Thank you for hosting this AMA! Because of you our company is now using ITCSS + BEM to create scalable and maintainable web applications!
How do you normally make ITCSS 'components' responsive? I've seen the use of responsive classes, but do you ever use media queries within your component's CSS?
What are your opinions on utilising data attributes for styling? (such as http://codepen.io/SudoCat/pen/wzBzoG - shameless plug, I know, but a prime example of what I'm talking about)
A lot of people slam unqualified attribute selectors and wildcard attribute selectors, but they provide a huge amount of power to us devs, especially helping make our CSS more Object Orientated - where do you stand on the matter? (Kind of related to the above question)
I know you're a huge BEM advocate, but what about SUIT?
How do you deal with the horrors of JavaScript/CMS plugins injecting their nasty markup into your projects? I often try to avoid plugins with markup like the plague, but it's often unavoidable (Bloody carousels)
Is the dream of a truly clean, tidy, maintainable code base really achievable? I feel like my FED life is spent fighting for nearly unattainable goals - is there a light at the end of the tunnel?
Agencies or Products? I've been in the agency rat race my whole career, where few companies or clients value code quality. What do you think is more useful to improving your development practises, and which do you personally prefer?
I just want to take a second to say a huge thank you for your contributions to the front end community. Your blog posts have been a huge inspiration for me, and I credit a lot of my front end success to your writing and the mindset you approach CSS with.
Cheers!
Hi Harry,
I'd love to hear your thoughts on http://youmightnotneedjs.com and especially using the radio/check buttons and :checked "hack" in css (See tabs/accordion)
Hi Harry!
There's very little known about your personal life in the public. Sorry my questions are little personal, since it's AMA (Ask me anything). ;)
Have been following following your talks, you are awesome! :)
Lisa
Do you advocate the use of CSS frontend frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, etc.? Have you used them?
If you’re aware of React, what is your opinion on coupling styles with components? What do you think of styled-components.com?
What are a few of the simple, yet not very well known “front-end performance” tricks?
Suarez
In an earlier answer, you said by just moving tags to the top, you have observed an increase of over 0.5 seconds. I have a follow up question : what are the tools you use to perform audits, and measure improvements?