What goes wrong with CSS
- CSS grows with site size. Depending on your site, this can be a serious issue — not just for performance, but because CSS is code. More code tends to lead to more problems — maintaining code size is a serious concern.
- CSS best practices encourage what would otherwise be bad programming: repetition, bad grouping, loose coupling. Again, if you treat CSS as code that needs to be maintained, reviewed, and refactored, these are negatives.
- CSS is often contextually unreadable. For example,
.about .main ul li li amight be very clever CSS, using a nesting in the markup to trigger a style, but it’s very bad code — without a strong understanding of the HTML, this code can be ambiguous, and its HTML target hard to pinpoint.- CSS encourages overrides, which are the death toll for maintainability. The more styles you override, the more styles you will eventually have tooverride again.
- CSS encourages bad coupling and distant dependencies — for example, let’s say all LIs inherit a margin-bottom we set early in the CSS, and the features we code design with this spacing in mind. Despite the fact that the art director says a particular feature MUST look the way the comp looks, said feature now depends on a very remote line of code, a line that anyone might change without realizing the consequences.
Found at Viget.com, CSS Strategy Square-off.
The approaches highlighted, OOCSS & SMACSS, in the article are also what I consider to adapt going forward with CSS development/authorship.
