CSS Chat Summary: 22 October 2020

The meeting took place here on Slack. @danfarrow (me!) facilitated, standing in for @notlaura.

Housekeeping

There were no housekeeping items this week.

CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. Audit (#49582)

@ryelle reminded us that we have a basic report available on Github. General feedback on the content would be welcome!

@kburgoine posited adding a link to the report to ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. #26350: !important audit to show some progress on that issue.

@ryelle suggested holding off as the report’s presentation is likely to change soon, and @danfarrow added that, as part of his styling contributions, he’ll be adding in-page links which would allow us to link directly to the !important section of the report.

Color Scheming (#49999)

@ryelle reminded us that she has an environment set up for testing her reduced-colors branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch".:

If you’re comfortable setting up a dev environment, you can run this branch; but if you just want to see a demo, you can log into this test site. The username & password are:

username: color-author
password: fPj1ugpm5SMlRR^Evf%zg5)f

(fyi, that’s just an author-level account, and if anything starts getting spammy I’ll reset the password)

There is a dashboard note on the test site showing details of how to contribute.

@ryelle went on to share a Slack post from @helen which clarified an issue which had probably already been lurking at the back of our minds:

Yeah this is unfortunately really hard to judge without (dun dun dun) visual regressionregression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5. testing…

We had a brief chat about that particular rabbit hole. @kburgoine mentioned being impressed by percy.io‘s githubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ integration, and @danfarrow mentioned recently enjoying backstop.js.

The discussion concluded with two suggestions:

  1. It would be useful at some point to recap the current landscape of visual regression testing in WordPress in order to judge the feasibility
  2. The colors project could perhaps be put on a back-burner for the time being until 5.6 is released in December and we could focus our attentions on the CSS audit

CSS links share + Open floor

@ryelle posted a call for testing Twenty Twenty-One as a good place for CSS folks to help out, with PRs to review and issues up for grabs. The 5.6 betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. would also benefit from your attention – get those issues while they’re hot!

@kburoine shared a link to a very entertaining CSS Tricks article from John Rhea who hand-coded daily CSS animations for 60 days on the theme of zombies.

@danfarrow shared a link to the proposed CSS nesting syntax which would make CSS a bit more SASSy.

Finally @danfarrow concluded the meeting by thanking everybody in #core-css for being so welcoming & supportive since he first attended back in June 2020.

Thanks everybody for attending!

#summary