CSS Chat Summary: 25 February 2021

The meeting took place here on Slack. @notlaura facilitated and @danfarrow wrote up these notes.

Housekeeping

  • @ryelle suggested she could run a coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress.-specific bugbug A bug is an error or unexpected result. Performance improvements, code optimization, and are considered enhancements, not defects. After feature freeze, only bugs are dealt with, with regressions (adverse changes from the previous version) being the highest priority. scrub next week, ahead of the upcoming release – thanks @ryelle!

Project updates

CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. Audit (#49582)

There was a discussion about whether the time is right to share this project with the wider community:

  • @notlaura suggested adding container audits would bring the project to that point, although the tool does fulfill the objectives of the original audit ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.
  • @ryelle suggested also an introductory post on make/core and moving the repo into the WordPress 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/ org, preferably after the 5.7 release

There was discussion of how “dead” CSS could be deprecated & eventually removed

  • @ryelle observed that helper tools (e.g. for the adminadmin (and super admin) colours reduction project) help mitigate the risks of removing CSS
  • @williampatton suggested measuring the potential impact of particular CSS deprecations on pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party developers by performing regex searches on plugins in the directory
  • @notlaura shared a Google doc from earlier in the CSS audit process with some preliminary results using purgeCSS to find redundant CSS in core
  • @ryelle pointed out that about.css has a whole section of deprecated code that could be used to test out a CSS deprectation flow

Color Scheming (#49999)

  • @notlaura reminded us that next week we’re hoping to see some CodePens / sandboxes of approaches to naming custom properties for colours in the buttons – details here in Slack
  • @ryelle shared ticket #52623 which proposes adding a CSS custom property to represent the height of the WordPress admin bar
  • Introducing this custom property into core, along with its tooling & documentation requirements, would be a great opportunity to get the ball rolling

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 (#49606)

  • We had intended to remove this from the agenda but as it was mentioned @williampatton asked for some clarification on the current state of the ticket
  • Briefly, the visual regression tool in @tellthemachines’ PR is intended to be run on a person’s local machine, rather than running on CI & adding screenshots to the repo

With that @notlaura realised that we had run out of time & the meeting closed.

Thanks everyone!

#core-css, #summary