Revisiting the Rendering Tier

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Have you ever created a well-intentioned, thoughtful design system only to watch it grow into an ever-increasing and scary codebase? I've been working in sort of the opposite direction, inheriting the scary codebase and trying to create a thoughtful system from it.

Here's Alex Sanders on the topic, explaining how his team at The Guardian has tackled the task of creating design systems while combating complexity:

Systems that try to contain complexity over long periods of time by convention will inevitably tend toward entropy, because one significant characteristic of convention is that it is trivially simple to break one.

You do not even need to be malicious. A convention is not a line in the sand. You can have a very good case for breaking or stretching one, but once a convention is no longer fully observed, subsequent cases for breaking or stretching it are automatically stronger, because the convention is already weakened. The more this happens, the weaker it gets.

Complexity and entropy can be two outcomes in the same situation, but need not be mutually exclusive. Interesting to think that our best intentions to guard against complexity can be somewhat destructive.

I also love how Alex explains why it’s not possible for their team to use a Tachyons-esque approach to writing styles because of the way that their development environment is kinda slow. It would be painful for the team to make that switch, despite how it could solve some other problems. This reminded me that measuring problems in this way is why there can never be a single way to write CSS. We need that inherent flexibility, even at the expense of introducing inconsistencies. Hence, conventions being less of a line in the sand and more of a guide post.

On a separate note, I really like how Alex describes styles and attributes as the reasons why his team is writing those styles. It's about aligning with business objectives:

...tens of thousands of rules that are intended to describe a maintainable set of responses to business and design problems.

That’s interesting since I don’t think we spend much time here talking specifically about the business side of CSS and the functional requirements that a styled user interface needs to accomplish.

And perhaps thinking about that can help us write better styles in the long term. Is this line of CSS solving a problem? Does this new class resolve an issue that will help our customers? These are good questions to keep in mind as we work, yet I know I don’t spend enough time thinking about them. I often see the design I’m turning into code as a problem to be solved instead.

Perhaps we should expand the way we styling a webpage because maybe, just maybe, it will help us write more maintainable code that's built to solve a real business objective.

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