Full meeting transcript on Slack.
I (@isabel_brison) facilitated the meeting.
The agenda was empty except for Open Floor.
I proposed a question to reflect on for this and future meetings: “What, if anything, should we improve about our CSS Cascading Style Sheets. in core Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and/or gutenberg The Gutenberg project is the new Editor Interface for WordPress. The editor improves the process and experience of creating new content, making writing rich content much simpler. It uses ‘blocks’ to add richness rather than shortcodes, custom HTML etc. https://wordpress.org/gutenberg/? And what, if anything, are we already doing particularly well? “ (If anyone reading this would like to contribute an answer, feel free to pop into the next meeting, or just add a note to the agenda if you can’t make it to the actual meeting!)
@bemdesign expressed concern that the adoption of modern development approaches, especially CSS-in-JS JavaScript, a web scripting language typically executed in the browser. Often used for advanced user interfaces and behaviors., and the build tooling necessary for React React is a JavaScript library that makes it easy to reason about, construct, and maintain stateless and stateful user interfaces. https://reactjs.org/. apps, might over-complicate the process for new developers to get started.
We discussed how to ease the learning curve and make it easier for new developers to get involved:
- Choosing tools with an easier syntax (in the CSS-in-JS case)
- Education and documentation
- Out-of-the-box build configs, such as
@wordpress/scripts
Then, going back to the initial question, @peterwilsoncc suggested overly high specificity of some CSS selectors could be improved, and ideally we should have a consistent level of specificity throughout.
@youknowriad added that we should try to create style variations in components instead of trying to override default component styles with additional classnames.
@laras126 suggested using single-declaration utility classes that sit further down the cascade, and passing in classnames as props.
We agreed backward compatibility may make it hard to change our current approach completely.
Open Floor
@laras126 shared a link to a CSS working group discussion on the benefits of introducing a new CSS version.
We briefly discussed how a new version (CSS4) might be useful to us: adding visibility to current best practice approaches and as an encouragement to developers to learn the spec better.
That was all!
#core-css, #summary
