Dan Farrow 7:15 pm on July 15, 2021
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CSS Chat Summary: 08 July 2021

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

Housekeeping

Discussion: Custom Properties (#49930)

  • @ryelle has updated her PR with some custom-property additions to common.css
  • @ryelle observed that a small subset of custom-properties are getting used very often, noting “…while it feels like a lot of variables to be adding, we also use the same concepts in many places”. For example:
--wp-admin--surface--background: #fff;
--wp-admin--surface--background-alternate: #f6f7f7;
--wp-admin--surface--border: #c3c4c7;
--wp-admin--surface--border-alternate: #f0f0f1;
  • @colorful-tones had a question about a particular chunk of core CSS defining somme custom-properties being loaded from multiple unique sources which seems redundant
  • @ryelle clarified that it’s added from a SASS mixin in base-styles and she thinks its there to allow each package to be standalone
  • We agreed that it does feel somewhat redundant when multiple packages are used together. Possibly it’s something that could be improved in future with coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. custom-properties

CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets. Link Share / Open Floor

  • @ryelle shared a comment on the CSS deprecation ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. (#53070) that she wants to reply to. This led to a discussion about CSS deprecation which covered some of the following:
    • A wider discussion about CSS backwards compatibility needs to happen
    • Some kind of tooling might help to address the issue
    • In the ticket comment, @tellthemachines comments that, as moving redundant CSS into a deprecated.css file doesn’t offer a performance boost, it would be simpler to move it to a /* Deprecated */ section at the end of its file. @colorful-tones disagreed, noting that it deprecated.css existed it could be dequeued for a performance boost. @ryelle asked what would then happen if you installed a 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 that uses a deprecated style
    • @colorful-tones agreed with JJJs comment, adding that “Plugin developers need to keep up with changes. If their plugin breaks then it is on them to update.”
    • @ryelle noted that the deprecation issue centres more on “elements that don’t exist in core anymore but a plugin could be using that markup & expecting the CSS to just be there”
    • @colorful-tones observed that multiple deprecation paths might be needed for the various sources of CSS, which @ryelle summarised as theme CSS (the Twentys styles), wp-admin CSS (all the files in wp-admin/css and wp-includes/css) and GutenbergGutenberg 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/ CSS (“technically a subset of wp-admin CSS but also its own thing”)
    • @colorful-tones expressed support for the approach recommended in the TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticket: “Create deprecated.css and perhaps even start appending --deprecated-5.8 to classes that are deprecated.”

With that we were out of time. Thanks everyone!

#core-css, #summary