Friday, September 29th, 2006
Architecting CSS
CSS is pretty central to Ajax, and large Ajax projects often have a lot of CSS to deal with, so it’s worthwhile asking how to maintain all of it. Garrett Dimon’s Architecting CSS is a good set of advice for structuring your CSS files (from July, 2005; unearthed on Digg).
The article identifies three ways to organise your stylesheets:
- Archetype-Based A stylesheet for each class of page, e.g. homepage stylesheet, article stylesheet, etc.
- Page Element/Section-Based A stylesheet for each class of page section, e.g. header stylesheet, sidebar stylesheet.
- Tag-Based Similar to the previous approach, but based around tags, e.g. form stylesheet, table stylesheet.
Other topics include:
- Including stylesheets with @include
- Deciding how much to rely on selectors (Redundancy vs Dependency)
- Use of comments
- Use of !important
- Alphabetizing attributes to ensure you don’t forget any
3.7 rating from 33 votes
It’s a bit too general. But, not a bad reading.
I think it’s a good start. Could be a bit more detailed maybe, but overall it looks good.
Liana, Web Designer currently working on the hypothyroidism herbal project.