How do you review CSS?

#css #productivity #programming #discuss

What is your workflow when you have to do a tech review and there are a bunch of CSS-like files?
Do you follow some guidelines? Do you build the feature branch somewhere? Or you just close your eyes 🙈, click on the 'Viewed' checkbox and let the QA guys do the rest? 😬

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Top comments (10)

Robin Philip Thomas • Jan 14 '22

For us, first round of reivew is done by stylelint. What I usually check for in the next round are: are they

reusing existing styles and design tokens,
semantics of the html
css specificity probmems (seeing !importatnt is an easy sign of bad css)
improper usage of %, vh,vw, rem or em
adding unwanted css properties (usually when copying from stackoverflow without knowing what it does)

Ben Halpern • Jan 13 '22

Typically the question for me is... "Does this accurately follow patterns we have established in a healthy way?". Guidelines are great, but it is hard to be absolute about certain things, you sort of need to evaluate whether the current change follows patterns that lead to better overall CSS.

@pp is that okay?

Paweł Ludwiczak • Jan 13 '22

I think that makes sense.

I'd also add that sometimes devs tend to sneak-in some hacks in CSS more often than in other files :D I usually try to catch these and simplify when reviewing someone's CSS code. It all eventually affects readability but also maintainability of code.

Anton Frattaroli • Jan 14 '22

Off the top of my head, these are the sorts of things that would cross my mind when reviewing a PR for a UI framework:

Did they use BEM correctly?
Did they apply theming correctly?
Is there duplicate CSS?
Is there unnecessary CSS?
Did they use non-class selectors?
Did they hardcode colors?
If they modified the CSS, did they update the screenshots?
Are the scss variables documented and marked as default if necessary?
Are the rules in the correct order?
Are animations able to be disabled?

Those are the only ones I can think of that are actionable. "Does it feel right?" doesn't really count, but it would be on my list.

M. Akbar Nugroho • Jan 15 '22

Oh, thank you. I think I need do research about a11y and z-index

M. Akbar Nugroho • Jan 14 '22

Why setting z-index are bad practices and should avoided? Overlay, modal, etc works with z-index isn't it?

codingjlu • Jan 14 '22

z-index is bad for accessibility (like screen readers) because it sort of places stuff in the wrong order and confuses people.

codingjlu • Jan 14 '22

But at the same time, remember that z-index is useful in some situations like popups or banners or nitty gritty stuff.

William Iommi • Jan 15 '22

Thank you all for your time/responses, much appreciate ❤️.

I'd say that our workflow is very similar to the one described by @robie577 and @antonfrattaroli.

We use BEM, Stylelint, SCSS variables, mixins, and so on. Could be complex when the project is big and you have to deal with many devs with different skills/seniority.

Anyway, I think that one of the important aspects is how solid is your UI / Design System, which is maybe close to what @ben said, if I understood correctly 😬.

If you have a poor UI/DS, you are open to a variety of ‘style combinations’ (even small stuff) that are ‘perfectly fine’ from a UI perspective, but they could lead you to a difficult review process with a bloated CSS code to maintain.