Chapter 6. Dealing with State Changes in ECSS
In the last chapter we considered project organisation and how to understand and apply the ECSS class naming conventions. In this chapter we will move our focus to how ECSS deals with active interfaces and how we can facilitate style changes in a rationale and accessible manner.
The majority of web applications need to deal with states.
First let's just crystallise what we mean by states. Consider some examples:
- A user clicks a button
- A value in an interface is updated
- An area of an interface is disabled
- A widget in the interface is busy
- An entered value exceeds allowable values
- A section of the application starts containing live data
All these eventualities can be defined as state changes. State changes that we typically need to communicate to the user. As such they are changes that need to be communicated to the DOM, and subsequently our style sheets need some sane way of catering to these needs.
How can we define these state changes...