My CSS guidelines didn’t sit too well with some… here’s a rebuttal

csswizardry.com

11 points·csswizardry··3 comments

The issue I took was that in the HN submission you position them as best practices, but when questioned on them you said they are just guidelines that don't have to be followed all the time. This disagrees with your own views on what best practices are [1].

Perhaps it was just a badly phrased submission title, but it set the tone and direction of the discussion. The title effectively told people they are doing CSS wrong. People don't like to be wrong, and will go to great lengths to prove themselves right [2]. It's nothing personal and I bet if the title was less preachy, it would have gathered more productive comments and had a friendly tone.

In general your articles are high quality and the advice sound. I think this issue was caused solely by a bad title. Though I still don't understand why you hate IDs so much!

[1] http://csswizardry.com/2011/12/on-html-and-css-best-practice...

[2] http://xkcd.com/386/

I do agree, I think the wording was a little unclear. By and large these are better practices than we’re used to, but the title (and README) did say these were best practices compiled for me and Sky; not everyone will agree with them but they suit Sky down to the ground.

One thing I get is specificity:

This selector: > .carousel .panes .pane .slide-title{}

Is different from this selector:

> .slide-title{}

I'd prefer the 1st variant if it weren't for the verbosity, so I use SASS to organize and generate my CSS.

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