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Comment by cphoover | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I am an outlier... but I really don't like nested style documents like those founds with SASS, LESS, PostCSS. When the number of nested selectors becomes too great it can become very difficult to reason about. I would never use this without some kind of lint rule enforcing a maximum depth of selector nesting. I agree with the other commenters ITT taking the position flat CSS looks cleaner than nested documents.

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The difficulty you mention is definitely an issue, but the insane repetition required for even a modestly complex piece of UI when using "flat" CSS is worse, in my opinion. I suppose there might even be a slight efficiency gain over the wire once Sass outputs nested CSS by default.

I wrote flat CSS for many years and yeah it's a lot of work but also I find it becomes more difficult to parse visually.

Like when writing HTML or regular code, I find indentation helps me parse and navigate the structure very easily.

There are cases with complex components where it can become a bit complex, but it's trivial to split the tree in multiple parts to reduce the indentation.

I agree: even when I use preprocessors, I rarely nest “normal” selectors. The real win is nesting pseudoselectors (:hover, :focus, etc) and media queries.

You should use stylelint anyway and then you can set `max-nesting-depth`

https://stylelint.io/user-guide/rules/max-nesting-depth/

I mean, these days almost every JS developer use some kind of linter - why would you not use a linter for CSS? Literally nothing to lose since you can set the rules as relaxed as you want.

PS: I set it to 3 - Using good convention like SuitCSS I have never found I needed more nesting. Usually you think about a problem and find a simpler way to do it.

https://github.com/suitcss/suit/blob/master/doc/naming-conve...

TLDR If you use any of the good practices for CSS such as BEM or BEM-like you don't have lots of nesting anyway.

And I like how the article mentions as an example `ul article ul` and how to solve it by adding a symbol :is() to be able to nest, and it's literally the one thing you don't want to do anyway, which is a selector like `ul article ul` (as per BEM methodology). Instead `.list .article .article-list` as a veyr poor example doesn´t need the special "fix" the article mentions.

I generally only nest one level down, and at most two. Any more and, as you say, it becomes very convoluted, particularly when it comes to specificity. However, alongside pseudo elements, the killer feature for me is that nesting enables namespacing for components, which (a) leads to much simpler class names that makes CSS much easier to read and (b) stops a great deal of repetition of the class on the wrapper element.

> When the number of nested selectors becomes too great it can become very difficult to reason about.

This is a sign you need to decompose whatever design you are working on into smaller components. If you’re trying to write styles for a whole page at once, you’ll see this problem, but if you are working on small components, it’s very rare.

> decompose whatever design you are working on into smaller components

I haven't followed modern CSS development much. Does it have a module system now?

Not precisely a module system, but you at-least get scoping if you use web-components where you can restrict CSS to the scope of the web component. (There are CSS module systems, but they are not covered by a standard and use JS libs)

The problem is that web-components need JS enabled, which really, really sucks. Why should a component that can perfectly render itself using plain HTML and CSS need to have associated JS declaring: "Hey! I am a web-component!". Declarative web components would have made adoption of web-components super-high , but alas, corporate interests are against this feature.

If you give a junior front end developer CSS nesting, you can get some very janky results.

Working with SCSS codebases and junior developers, I've seen SCSS nesting get so bad, the line order of the selector in the stylesheet would determine what styling gets used.

Nesting CSS is useful in some cases, but for the majority of use cases it can get unwieldy very quickly.

When the number of nested selectors becomes too great it can become very difficult to reason about.

When any complexity becomes too much it makes it harder to reason about. The solution is to avoid complexity; you can do that while using a small number of nested selectors.

It’s Sass & Less, not SASS & LESS. Less is sometimes stylized with all caps (or all lower like {less}) and is an acronym for Leaner Style Sheets, but Sass was never was stylized with all caps nor is it an acronym.

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