kss

Knyle Style Sheets

Inspired by TomDoc, KSS attempts to provide a methodology for writing maintainable, documented CSS within a team. Specifically, KSS is a documentation specification and styleguide format. It is not a preprocessor, CSS framework, naming convention, or specificity guideline.

• The Spec (What KSS is)
• Example living styleguide

KSS in a nutshell

The methodology and ideas behind Knyle Style Sheets are contained in SPEC.md. At its core, KSS is a documenting syntax for CSS.

/*
A button suitable for giving stars to someone.

:hover             - Subtle hover highlight.
.stars-given       - A highlight indicating you've already given a star.
.stars-given:hover - Subtle hover highlight on top of stars-given styling.
.disabled          - Dims the button to indicate it cannot be used.

Styleguide 2.1.3.
*/
a.button.star{
  ...
}
a.button.star.stars-given{
  ...
}
a.button.star.disabled{
  ...
}

KSS can also support words as Styleguide section names

// Styleguide Forms.Checkboxes.
// - or -
// Styleguide Forms - Special Checkboxes.

Ruby Library

This repository includes a ruby library suitable for parsing SASS, SCSS, and CSS documented with KSS guidelines. To use the library, include it in your project as a gem from https://rubygems.org/gems/kss. Then, create a parser and explore your KSS.

styleguide = Kss::Parser.new("#{RACK_ROOT}public/stylesheets")

styleguide.section('2.1.1')
# => <Kss::Section>

styleguide.section('2.1.1').description
# => "A button suitable for giving stars to someone."

styleguide.section('2.1.1').modifiers.first
# => <Kss::Modifier>

styleguide.section('2.1.1').modifiers.first.name
# => ':hover'

styleguide.section('2.1.1').modifiers.first.class_name
# => 'pseudo-class-hover'

styleguide.section('2.1.1').modifiers.first.description
# => 'Subtle hover highlight'

You can also initialize the Kss::Parser with a string CSS by using Kss::Parser.new(string)

buttons =<<-'EOS'
  /*
  Your standard form button.

  :hover    - Highlights when hovering.
  :disabled - Dims the button when disabled.

  Styleguide 1.1
  */
  button {
    padding: 5px 15px;
    line-height: normal;
    /* ... */
  }
  button:disabled {
    opacity: 0.5;
  }
EOS
styleguide = Kss::Parser.new(buttons)

styleguide.section('1.1')
# => <Kss::Section>

styleguide.section('1.1.1').description
# => "Your standard form button."

# ...

The library is also fully TomDoc'd, completing the circle of life.

Generating styleguides

The documenting syntax and ruby library are intended to generate styleguides automatically. To do this, you'll need to leverage a small javascript library that generates class styles for pseudo-class styles (:hover, :disabled, etc).

• kss.coffee
• kss.js (compiled js)

For an example of how to generate a styleguide, check out the example sinatra application.

Development

To hack on KSS, you'll need to install dependencies with bundle install. Run tests with rake.

To make your life easier, I suggest bundle install --binstubs and adding bin/ to your $PATH. If you don't understand this, just blindly add bundle exec in front of everything you'd normally do, like bundle exec rake.

I apologize on behalf of the Ruby community for this, it's embarrassing and disappointing that dependency management is still so clumsy.

Implementations

The KSS specification has also been implemented in Python, Node.js and PHP