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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

Linting tools tend to be a combination of rules that make your code nicer to look at by some relatively arbitrary stylistic convention and rules for keeping out code that because of the nature of the language can lead to footguns.

Stylelint in my experience is almost all, if not all, about enforcing stylistic convention. I can't stand it because I do not find most of the stylistic conventions enforced to actually improve legibility.

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I agree with the sentiment but as other user pointed out, there are quite a few rules that can enforce very strict limits on css selectors complexity : limiting sibling selectors, descendants, limit combined ( eg. .foo .bar .baz = 3 parts ), low specificity even down to 1, disallow ids, !important, etc.

This requires in my experience using a consistent bem syntax otherwise specificity snowballs pretty fast.

why is disallowing id's a feature? it makes headless testing so much more easier, amongst other things.

Ids overpower everything else in the css cascade, in particular any utilities like tailwind’s (unless you activate !important for utils, which also has its cascading effects and heavyhanded fix).

Using an id is not inherently wrong, and with stylelint you can always disable a rule for the exceptions, with a comment of the form /* stylelint-disable-next-line <optional specific rule id> */

Nowadays esp. with composition methodology it’s almost always better to just use a unique bem like class, eg. .HomepageHero-carousel , even if the element in question is a "singleton"... because later someone can stick a mb-4 on it, or a text-lg , or even your own custom utility or modifier and it will stick, without snowballing css selector complexity.

I didn’t understand your reply at first. If you use ids for easy targeting parts of html, then it doesn’t matter, stylelint doesn’t check the html.

Applying styles can be done via classes so the css selectors in your stylesheets do not need to mention any #ids.

Applying styles with #ids however, is an issue.

In my experience there are a fair amount of rules in the second category of yours (anti-footguns). For instance, preventing invalid properties alone is a huge one. There are also rules like [1], a few violations of which popped up in our legacy styles. No dev of ours would've caught those.

[1] https://stylelint.io/user-guide/rules/no-descending-specific...

hmm, maybe it's just that I am only being caught out by the styling rules, or maybe it is that I am pretty good at understanding the cascade so the linked example is actually something that - while probably a footgun - for me is likely to be annoying because I actually wanted to do what I did.

But I guess deploying a footgun is often a minimum two person job:

first person writes code that when used wrong will shoot in foot but they would never use wrong, next person actually pulls the trigger.

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