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Breaking Good Habits
Harry Roberts—@csswizardry
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Harry who?!
•Web designer/developer
•Senior UI Developer—BSkyB
•@csswizardry
•csswizardry.com
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Necessary
explanation of the
cheesy, overly-
cryptic talk title.
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Web standards…
•A great idea? Definitely!
•Well intentioned? You bet!
•Ambiguous? Sadly :(
•Open to interpretation? Unfortunately…
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…web standards
•Rules? Definitely not!
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Best practices
•Best for who?
•What are we achieving?
•What do we really want to achieve?
•Are we always solving the right
problems for the right people?
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Good habits?
•Avoiding classes and IDs
•‘Handcrafting’ our CSS
•Avoiding extra markup
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Bad habits?
•Classitis—using too many classes
•Grid systems
•Extra markup
•‘Insemantic’ class names
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We’ve been
solving the wrong
problems for the
wrong people!
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The 4 ‘-ility’s
•Maintainability
•Flexibility
•Extensibility
•Predictability
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Maintainability
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Flexibility
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body > div:nth-of-type(2) > article:first-
child > p:first-child{ font-size:1.2em }
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...
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Be ?#*@ing explicit!
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.intro{ font-size:1.2em; }
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...
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Specific !== explicit
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Extensibility
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Extensible
•Stop thinking in pages…
•…think in components…
•…then think in abstractions.
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Predictability
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Expect the
unexpected
Always build like your client’s CMS is a bulldozer…
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CSS selectors
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IDs
•Don’t use IDs in CSS
•Ever.
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IDs
•No advantage over classes.
•Waaaaaay overly specific.
•Not dissimilar to !important
•Everything you can do with an ID can
be done with a class.
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Classes
•No one uses classes except browsers
and other developers (and
microformats).
•Classes are neither semantic or
insemantic; they’re sensible or
insensible.
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.red
.red{
color:red;
}
I am a designer and developer
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.red
.red{
color:blue; /* WTF */
}
I am a designer and developer
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.brand
.brand{
color:#BADA55; /* FTW */
}
I am a designer and developer
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Objects and
abstractions
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The media object
bit.ly/cCY3Ew
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The media object
bit.ly/cCY3Ew
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The media object
bit.ly/cCY3Ew
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The media object
bit.ly/cCY3Ew
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The media object
bit.ly/cCY3Ew
![]()
.media,.body { overflow:hidden; }
.img { float:left; margin-right:20px; }
.img img { display:block; }
Lorem ipsum...
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Nicole Sullivan
@stubbornella
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The nav abstraction
bit.ly/oD2M9n
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.nav{
list-style:none;
margin-left:0;
}
.nav li{
display:inline;
}
.nav a{
display:inline-block;
}
The nav abstraction
bit.ly/oD2M9n
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- ...
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The island object
bit.ly/oqQ7JJ
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The island object
bit.ly/oqQ7JJ
...
.island{
padding:1.5em;
}
.island > :last-child{
margin-bottom:0;
}
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The island object
bit.ly/oqQ7JJ
...
.island.promo{
color:#fff;
background-color:#C0FFEE;
}
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Double stranded
heading hierarchy
h1,.alpha { font-size:; line-height:; }
h2,.beta { font-size:; line-height:; }
h3,.gamma { font-size:; line-height:; }
h4,.delta { font-size:; line-height:; }
h5,.epsilon { font-size:; line-height:; }
h6,.zeta { font-size:; line-height:; }
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Double stranded
heading hierarchy
Recent tweets
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Grid systems
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Abstract layout
into its own layer
Keep components free of dimensions
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csswizardry.com/fluid-grids
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Straighten up!
@media(max-width:480px){
.grid{
float:none;
clear:both;
width:auto;
margin:0;
}
}
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All together now!
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Benefits and side-
effects
•Sites are faster to build…
•…more robust
•…more maintainable
•…more consistent
•…and incidentally more efficient.
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Efficiency on the
client side
•Reused classes are ‘performance
freebies’
•Abstractions mean DRYer code; less to
download and evaluate
•Classes match quicker than
descendants
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Now what?
•Solve problems for the right people.
•Keep yourselves happy and sane.
•Learn when enough is enough; cut
yourself some slack.
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However bad you
think it is, there’s
always worse…
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Breaking Good Habits
•Harry Roberts – @csswizardry
•csswizardry.com
•Nicole Sullivan – @stubbornella