http://www.scrambledbrains.net/2013/02/28/the-selector-space-race/ All things Mike McGranahan. Mon, 27 Apr 2026 08:05:58 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=1.5.2 http://www.scrambledbrains.net/2013/02/28/the-selector-space-race/#comment-52592 Tue, 28 May 2013 20:14:48 +0000 http://www.scrambledbrains.net/2013/02/28/the-selector-space-race/#comment-52592 [...] I’m always on the lookout for thought-provoking discussion about CSS, since I find it so rare. Smashing Magazine can occasionally turn up quality information about CSS, as they did recently in a guest piece that described the nose-to-tail rebuild of the London Times’ website. An interesting read overall, the part that stood out most to me detailed their approach to CSS. They anticipated pain around HTML view re-use and re-composition (into various layouts), and sought to structure their CSS accordingly. I applaud their efforts (despite dropping the goal of semantic naming, which would seriously concern me), and noticed that it resembled an approach I had taken early in Blocvox’s development. I weighed in to share my experiences, and wanted to reproduce it here as a follow up to techniques described in my recent post about the motive for modular CSS. I started with the same use of long/multipart class names, and although it is performant, I found it a bit cumbersome to develop with. In my approach, I strictly adhered to representing each level of structure in the class name, so a link in the headline would have the class name ‘.apple_headline_link’. This made nesting or un-nesting elements require a lot of tedious class renaming, making rapid experimentation very burdensome. [...] […] I’m always on the lookout for thought-provoking discussion about CSS, since I find it so rare. Smashing Magazine can occasionally turn up quality information about CSS, as they did recently in a guest piece that described the nose-to-tail rebuild of the London Times’ website. An interesting read overall, the part that stood out most to me detailed their approach to CSS. They anticipated pain around HTML view re-use and re-composition (into various layouts), and sought to structure their CSS accordingly. I applaud their efforts (despite dropping the goal of semantic naming, which would seriously concern me), and noticed that it resembled an approach I had taken early in Blocvox’s development. I weighed in to share my experiences, and wanted to reproduce it here as a follow up to techniques described in my recent post about the motive for modular CSS. I started with the same use of long/multipart class names, and although it is performant, I found it a bit cumbersome to develop with. In my approach, I strictly adhered to representing each level of structure in the class name, so a link in the headline would have the class name ‘.apple_headline_link’. This made nesting or un-nesting elements require a lot of tedious class renaming, making rapid experimentation very burdensome. […]

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