Ask HN: Anyone have a really smart way to organize css?
I'd love to see an example of super organized, tight CSS. Do you organize by location (header, footer, body), by function (typography, position data), or both, with multiple instances of the same selector? Wondering how my css stacks up and where I could improve. Thanks! (:
Natalie Downe, my co-founder, has a very neat technique for organising CSS which she calls a CSS System. She described it in this talk:
http://lanyrd.com/2008/barcamp-london-5/sg/
She splits everything in to general styles (basic HTML elements), helper styles (things like forms, notifications, icons), page structure (header, footer, layout columns etc), page components (reusable composable classes for components that occur on different pages in different combinations, such as a news teaser) and over-rides (special cases for individual pages, rarely used).
She hardly ever uses IDs, preferring classes for almost everything - because CSS written against classes can be used more than once on a page.
She uses CSSEdit's groups feature to make the CSS easier to navigate - it's all in one file. http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/
View the stylesheets on http://lanyrd.com/ and follow the link at the top to the unminified version to see annotated examples.
Ideally, I use Sass with Compass (http://compass-style.org/). This alone is a great start to keeping things organized. One of the things I love about Sass is that it allows partials and variable declarations, which both help immensely with code organization.
Then, my code is usually organized as follows. Each section can be extracted to a partial if it gets long enough or if more separation is desired.
Since Sass uses indentation, I indent everything in each section within a top level tag. This really helps visually distinguish each section and gives a much less uniform look to the stylesheet which makes it a lot more scannable. If a section uses methods exclusively I'll declare them just above the top-level section tag.Framework includes and resets Variable declarations — colors, possibly specific widths Universal method declarations Standard global tags — headings, p, a, ul, li, etc... Generic form styling, usually in a dedicated partial Layout — container, header, content, footer Then to specific section stylingI'm pretty happy with this approach. It was formed fairly organically but become more defined as I use it for more projects. It also seems to work well for both large and small projects, since partials can be used when the code starts getting long.
I have four core files:
In addition to that, I use a separate file for each "page type". For example, 'article.css', 'index.css', stuff like that. Some larger sites merit additional files like splitting off 'forms.css', 'tabular.css', etc.reset.css - I use eric meyer's elements.css - Global defaults for things like body, h1, h2, h3, p, a, input, strong. All or almost all selectors in here are just tag names. layout.css - Just sets up the global layout with containers: e.g. header, footer, left column, right column. blocks.css - Reusable chunks.All files get concatenated and minified before serving, obviously.
At some point, the amount of CSS complexity becomes best handled by a preprocessor.
Stylus is great: http://learnboost.github.com/stylus/
I made a post about it, and personally prefer it to Sass and Less: http://nylira.com/stylus-the-revolutionary-successor-to-css/ The hardcore abbreviation mixins in my post seem to offend some coders. When you work in CSS and HTML hours every day though, every character saved adds up to a huge productivity boost.
My current project has 30 directories with 73 partial Sass files, which compile down to one 320kb file.
As to your question, I organize my partials based on controller and url structure.
After many years doing CSS my best workflow has come to this:
You need a good code editor that allows you to open files without tabbing or reaching for the mouse, I use Textmate's Command T to switch fast among my files.reset.css //for resetting browsers grid.css //if I'm using a css framework global.css //styles that are shared across the site section.css //styles that pertain a specific section. The name of the file varies, i.e. "about.css".reset.css There's a bunch around, I use the one from htmlboilerplate.com, but there's many good ones available. (Eric Meyer's). You will almost never touch this file.
grid.css I only use this occasionally, when I'm working on sites where the grid is very clear and I take out all the stuff I'm not going to use. I usually go for a three col version of 960.gs and trim it to about 12 lines of css. Never touch this.
global.css Here you put your nav, your footer, you body styles, etc. I think that separating by colors and typography doesn't make sense, because you usually change a widget's appearance.
section.css I count on the body tag having a classname, so I can have body class="about" and then do...
This way you never override your styles accidentally..about section.photo {...}Miscellaneous I avoid the one declaration per line convention when I have similar styles and I want to be able to read them in a table format, i.e.
I usually start from the most generic to the more specific, but I don't worry too much about code order because in the end I just do a search and reach it in no time..available {background-color: #0f0;} .taken {background-color: #00f;} .deleted {background-color: #f00;}Slightly related, but mainly a formatting issue, I format my css files as such:
instead of the more commonly seen:.foo { x: y; a: b } .bar { m: n } .baz { background: blah blah url(xyz.png) top left; x: y; i: j; }
My format takes up less vertical space in the editor. Sometimes, I can get my entire CSS file into a single page on the screen, reducing the amount of time I spend scrolling and searching. I do split lines when they go off the edge of the space, as seen in the .baz example..foo { x: y; a: b; } .bar { m: n } .baz { background: blah blah url(xyz.png) top left; x: y; i: j; }I'm hoping for some good answers here, because I'd love a better way.
I always put universal elements first (body, img, @font-face, etc.), then I just organize it top to bottom by page location (i.e. header, content, sidebar, footer, etc.). I also tab-indent so that elements within another are indented and "contained" underneath, making it easy for me to move from one section to the next. I also write the CSS horizontally, only making a new line for a new element.
I should also note that I'm a n00b :-), so this could be a horrible way to do it.
I can't recommend Compass/Sass highly enough. A CSS pre-processor will completely free you to organize your CSS however you want, and more importantly, it lets you build up a library of common components (forms, buttons, etc.) that you can easily reuse and adapt for new projects.
Generally, these library files will simply contain mixins (reusable chunks of code), so they don't output anything directly into your CSS, but allow you to include the mixins in certain styles. Very useful for adding effects, rounded corners, etc. on different elements.
Keep in mind however, that mixins can be overused, adding bloat to your code. CSS does cascade, after all. You should always look to see if you can separate reusable css rules to include in markup (commonly seen with grid systems). How you balance out the convenience of keeping your css flexible vs. not littering your markup with lots of styles really depends on the project, but it's something to think about.
I have developed one very useful trick while using Sass for managing colors. Instead of assigning colors directly to an element (very hard to track down later if a change is necessary), I create color variables named after the element and attribute in question. Then in my colors.scss file, I build up my color palette, and after, list all the color variables I created in my stylesheets, setting their values to the appropriate color from the palette (with tweaks, if necessary).
Since Sass lends itself to lots of files, keeping all my colors and the elements they are assigned to together in one file makes them much easier to manage down the road.// in colors.scss --- // color palette $red: #ff0000; // assign colors to elements $body-background-color: $red; // in layout.css, for example --- body { background-color: $body-background-color; }Suprised no-one has mentioned Nicole Sullivan's (amongst others) Object Oriented CSS (OOCSS) project: https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/wiki
She used this approach at Facebook (and Yahoo, I think?) to successfully tidy up a huge code base of thousands of CSS files down to a more manageable few.
I attended her workshop at Webstock and since then had a chance to put it into practice on a 'get it up quick' green fields project (http://chchneeds.org.nz). I must say I was really pleasantly surprised at the way this approach just avoids a lot of the pain points, as a web developer/coder (ie not an html/css guru) I so often face when just getting the simplest things to 'work'.
I guess the hardest thing for me to get my head around to was that to make things more modular you had to let go (a tiny bit) of being so religious about 'semantic html' as a requirement for the HTML, but I think its worth it to get your CSS a whole lot more modular and 'pluggable' together.
Still a bit more work to do, IMHO, but I'm definitely going to be monitoring this project closely.
Nicole Sullivan's site: http://www.stubbornella.org/content/
I once tried breaking my css into files according to function (typography.css, color.css, layout.css). It ended up being a royal pain because when I added a new HTML element and I went to style it, I ended up having to duplicate the css selector for that element in three files. I also was constantly switching among the three files to work with one element's styles. So whatever you do, don't organize by function. :)
my rules:
1) Layout and widgets only.
I start with a reset, then layout (block positioning), then widgets. Everything other than layout is a widget. There are no global styles. If there is one of it, it's an ID. If more, it's a class.
2) No (global) element styles! Ever!
No, not even a p { margin: xyz } or a ul { list-style-type }. Every element that cannot be referred to by class / id must look exactly like it would after the reset.
This avoids complex dependency chains where coincidence influences look. Widgets can be moved from one site to another and you actually have to think new widgets through rather than relying on the default values.
3) Avoid classes and id's as much as you can.
Have single base element with a simple but descriptive class name, and then specify the sub-elements.
For example: Instead of “div.content-title” use “#content h1″ (e.g. div#content with a h1 tag inside it).
Basically, design widgets which consist of one base element, and refer to sub-elements via longer expressions. Use indentation to separate sub-elements.
My strong preference is to maximize for human readability (=short dependency chains, descriptive widgets rather than single elements) rather than short CSS. Cascading within widget-scope is fine, but cascading with global styles should be avoided. I find that when I follow these rules, I like my CSS a lot more.
I leverage SASS and Compass for Ruby heavily.
I utilize mixins heavily so I can modulize all my styling and make sure it's included in areas that are appropriate. I've learned this is the only way to handle CSS without styles getting too complicated and accidentally changing something where you didn't mean to.
Example (create a mixin that has certain styles for forms and then include it in a body.wizard page) this way I keep my CSS very dry.
General coding guidelines are horizontal. I recently switched to this. I used to do vertical and indentation but it's very hard to read with big files. I've found that it's a lot easier to read horizontal CSS.
I alpha all my styles from a-z.
I also use Sass and Compass. I generally organize the directory roughly like this for projects without a separate designer:
The files with leading underscores are partials which are included in the master.sass. Note that facebox is an scss file. I just dump the CSS in it and include the partial in master.stylesheets - ie.sass - master.sass patials - _base.sass - _forms.sass utilities - _custom_mixins.sass vendor - _facebox.scssThe nice thing about sass is that it you can change output format, so you can just include all the external CSS files as partials and automatically output a single compressed files with your entire CSS.
When I work with a designer who uses CSS I use a structure like this:
In this case, the designer's CSS is dumped in the _style.scss partial, then included in master.sass. Then in master.sass I include my modifications to the designer stylesheets. That way I can leave the designer-provided CSS largely untouched and still have all the flexibility and power of Sass.stylesheets - master.sass partials - _style.scss vendor - _facebox.sassUse SASS with partials and mixins and sort them as it's more convenient for you (probably following the natural flow of descending order of your page).
Don't overcomplicate things:
- Have only one CSS-file, unless your project is huge.
- Never use IDs
- Avoid reset CSS (espescially if you can ignore IE6/7
- If you think you need variables (like in SASS), you are probably thinking about it the wrong way
- Give classes functional names, not presentational
- Linebreaks after declaration. (Makes your CSS-file easier to navigate)
- Remember that you can use you media queries inside your CSS-file
Web designer Jens Meiert has some good articles:
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20090401/why-css-needs-no-variable...
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20080515/css-organization-and-effi...
http://meiert.com/en/blog/20070321/css-practice-pseudo-names...
Use tables for layout instead of CSS. Then your CSS will be more concise (essentially reduced to a theme) and less confusing (because CSS layout properties like float and position tend to cause the most confusion).
Edit: Rephrased to try and better express the idea.
Here's what I do:
- Almost all CSS goes in 1 big file. One line per selector to keep thinks clean and easy to find. Styles from external sources (like jQuery UI) go in separate files.
- Reset lines go at the top, if you use them, in a / RESET / section.
- Styles for individual HTML tags are next in the / HTML TAGS / section.
- Then a / UTILITY CLASSES / section for clearing floats, etc.
- Next comes site layout. Headers, footers, page width, etc. all go here. Just the layout though - think the grid. No real content styling yet.
- Now sections for each piece in the layout. Content styles go here. First a section for the / HEADER CONTENT /, then a big section for the / PAGE CONTENT / (vast majority of styles go here), then the / FOOTER CONTENT / styles.
Use less (http://lesscss.org/) - the JS version. Makes your code beautiful: no repetition, hierarchies, concise. Where I work we've used it for about 9 months now and there is no looking back.
I haven't used it, as there just hasn't been a project with enough lead time to experiment with something lately, but I'm fond of the idea of code generators for CSS, like CleverCSS for Python and Sass for Ruby.
Other than that, the best advice I can offer that I DO follow is that I group all HTML elements together, all IDs together, and then all classes together. Within each of those groupings, everything is in alphabetical order.
and so forth.body { foo: bar; } form { foo: bar; } h1, h2, h3 { foo: bar; } input { foo: bar; } p { foo: bar; } #container {} #footer {} #nav {} .etc {} .even {} .odd {}Sorry guys,
After reading all comments it seems there is no (universal) solution to write good HTML/CSS code. Not like in Ruby or Python or other programming languages.
Since this year I'm struggling to create a post / best practices how to code front-end but the problem is too complex (for me).
The biggest issue is how to mark up HTML to have a DRY (minimal) CSS. And how to remember easily these mark up rules to be able to maintain anytime in the future your CSS/HTML.
If you would elaborate your naming / marking up best practices instead of suggesting frameworks/tools maybe that would help better.
A good example of some super organized CSS is in the HTML5 Boilerplate by Paul Irish. Found here: https://github.com/paulirish/html5-boilerplate/blob/master/c... I sometimes use multiple instances of the same selector, especially if a project starts getting very big. I like to separate each function of the site into it's own block after the footer declarations. It lets me stay organized during development and ensures that I can keep track of what I'm working on while I'm working on it. Here's the order I'm currently using, which was inspired by the above:
/* HTML STRUCTURE STYLES */ body { foo: bar; } h1 { foo: bar; } a { foo: bar; } /* Image Replacement & Hacks */ .ir { foo: bar; } /* Container Styles */ #header { foo: bar; } #main { foo: bar; } #footer { foo: bar; } .column { foo: bar; } .sidebar { foo: bar; } .img-cotainer { foo: bar; } /* Everything inside of #header */ .navigation { foo: bar; } #header li.nav { foo: bar; } /* Everything inside of #main */ .content { foo: bar; } /* Everything inside of #footer */ .social { foo: bar; } #footer li.nav { foo: bar; } /* Everything in specific view inside of a container from above */ .profile { foo: bar; } .comments { foo: bar; } /* Media Queries */ @media all and (orientation:portrait { * { foo: bar; } } /* Print Styles using Media Query */ @media print { * { foo: bar; } }Like many of the other commenters, I break the code into reset, global elements, layout, modules/blocks, and then special overrides if any.
I'll admit it's a personal preference, but as a team consideration I don't recommend the 'all properties on one line' approach. It's discouraged in other languages so why do it in CSS?
Definitely check out OOCSS as well as the Natalie Downe talk both posted by in the comments already.
I can't overstate how highly I recommend Sass/SCSS. It's been mentioned already as "for Ruby". Yes, you need Ruby installed to use Sass/SCSS but you do not need to be working on a Ruby project to use it. You can run "sass --watch (directory name)" from the command line and sass will automatically compile your .scss (or .sass) files to .css files upon save. Even if you're scared of the command line I assure you, it's easy! If you're a TextMate user, there's also a great SCSS bundle here: https://github.com/kuroir/SCSS.tmbundle (it was enough for me to abandon CSSEdit for good)
One thing that hasn't been discussed in this thread yet is the organization of properties within a declaration block. It's a good idea to have an approach and stick with it. Alphabetizing the properties is one approach. I wrote about my preferred approach a couple years ago here: http://fordinteractive.com/2009/02/order-of-the-day-css-prop... (also check out the SitePoint discussion linked in the "Further Reading" section of the post)
I lay my styles out in 1 file and I don't often comment them. Stylesheets cascade to much to pin them to a specific area of use - it's easier to debug them by clever naming still - sigh. IE specific files loaded after and only contain 1 or two tricky IE tweaks. Javascript /Jquery plugins sometimes come with their own stylesheets, and in those cases I'll leave them where I found them. For some of the bigger sites with very different looks and feels, I'll often have a boilerplate (reset to skeleton level) and each page or section will load in their own stylesheet. Just depends how big the site is.
Order is: * Reset (only for early IE )-http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/reset/ I find myself using it less and less
* Global Styles - HTML tags - global font faces
* Clearfix - http://www.webtoolkit.info/css-clearfix.html
* Skeleton/Structural Styles - grids/divs/columns
* Headers/footers/persistent styles
* Page specific styles and IDs
* Conditionally load IE Styles if they're required
* load javascript plugin css with the plugin's preferred dir if possible
As for pipelining them, I usually just use a gzipped connection and still serve them individually, since internal image paths for backgrounds rely on the CSS path. CSS caches very nicely, so take advantage of it on the HTTP side.
example: http://code.google.com/p/streeme/source/browse/trunk/web/css...
I think alot of it depends what it is that you are building. My approach to would be different if it were building a large scale web app vs a website and it also depends on the team thats helping to maintain it (ie. if it were to be maintained by engineers who don't really know or care for css or a team of web devs)
I always start off with a base which consists of the misc. browser fixes and hacks + basic typography elements, rough blocking. My philosophy on formatting really follows what everyone here is saying. I really prefer horizontal lines and proper tabbing of all the sub elements because its really hard to read otherwise.
While commenting is really good and I like it, finding the proper balance is the key. When you're doing fast iteration it gets really tedious and cumbersome to go back and make sure your comments are in sync.
This is how i arrange my css: http://maderogue.com/public/assets/css/base.css
For bigger project I like to break things down by specific functions & models. (ie. tables, buttons, sorting controls, etc.)
i really like the way jquery ui themes are done.
I've really enjoyed SASS/SCSS optionally with Compass. It lets you compile the stylesheets while still keeping the source files separate and organized. I've also seen the approach with one big file for the application with commented sections, however, the drawback to that approach is using a version control system with multiple editors on a large file (merge conflicts, etc).
On an MVC site, I organize by controller. There's one general file for generic cross-site stuff (header/footer, etc.), supplemented by another CSS file that shares the markup for all controller-specific pages.
This gives a max of two css files per page. For the landing page I compress the generic file along with the controller-specific css file for the default page into a single file. This speeds up the loading process while preventing too much bloat. Since the other pages are usually hit after the landing page they require only a single extra download. Any reset code can be included in there as well, although maintained as a separate file.
I doubt this approach is ideal when it comes to organizing things, but it's fairly fast when it comes to development. I design by including css in style="" and then refactoring the markup into classes once the design is complete. Saves a lot of back and forth while getting things lined up.
For me the biggest goal is fewer lines to organize in the first place rather than any particular scheme for grouping. What I do is:
1) Use as few separate stylesheets site-wide as possible so any contradicting or repetitive rules will be obvious.
2) Use one line per rule so I can scan the selectors quickly, then scroll horizontally if necessary
3) I prefer complex comma-separated selectors which set one or two properties to simple selectors which set many properties. Grouping in this way gets me closer to having constants, e.g. a specific hex color won't be rewritten again and again, it will just follow a complex selector list.
4) Once a selector works, I try to make it more general, e.g. "div.info { font-size: 12px }" can probably just be ".info { font-size: 12px }". More general rules will apply in more cases, so fewer overall rules will be necessary.
The system I came up with is A table of contents that makes it easy to jump to specific styles.
First the global styles, then different things like Header, Navigation, Main Content, Right-hand-side-doodad, Widgets, Footer, etc.
Then create a Table of contents at the top and give each section a unique identifier, FEDCBA-Head, FEDCBA-Nav, etc. Go down to each group and put in a comment saying "Start of Navigation CSS <FEDCBA-Nav>".
Now you can look in the table of contents and do a quick file search on the unique identifier, and be taken right to the CSS you're looking for.
I generally make the table of contents a lot more detailed, and it has an upkeep cost, but it's well worth it when the CSS file gets big.
I usually include comments where necessary before a section, so in a file named global.css, I may have:
/* header / .header { margin: 0 auto; padding: 0; width: 800px; }
/ body / .body { margin: 0 auto; padding: 10px; width: 800px; background-color: #fff; }
/ footer */ .footer { margin: 0 auto; padding: 10px; background-color: #EEE; border-top: 1px solid #BBB; }
(this is just an example, assume the classes are for div's)
If I have multiple CSS files, I may just call one (style.css) in the <head> of HTML document. Then within the style.css, I can just make a list of the documents using @import.
((by the way, this didn't come out the way I expected on here))
Start by using sass reset.sass 960gs.sass default.sass In default @include reset and 960gs (sass compiles it all into one css file)
Then use a per page sass file that references default.sass
If you want something pre-built that does all this use compass.
I write general styles like definitions for *, a, p, ul etc first and after that I put everithing in DOM order when possible. Starting at the startpage of the website/project.
Within the selectordefinitions I write general definitions like width, heigt, displaytype and position (top/left.. margin, padding) first. Then contentspecific definitions like fontdefinitions. At the end I write border and background definitions.
That way it's an ease to see if an element hast a specific definitions, because I know if I'm looking for the width and the first definition is not the with then there is no width set for this element.
I write general styles like definitions for *, a, p, ul etc first and after that I put everything in DOM order if possible. Starting at the startpage of the website/project.
Within the selectordefinitions I write general definitions like width, heigt, display-type and position (top/left.. margin, padding) first. Then contentspecific definitions like font definitions. At the end I write border and background definitions.
That way it's an ease to see if an element hast a specific definitions, because I know if I'm looking for the width and the first definition is not the with then there is no width set for this element.
Ever since using Drupal's Zen theme I have preferred their basic setup for grouping CSS files. Here is a rough example:
html-reset.css layout-fixed.css page-backgrounds.css messages.css pages.css blocks.css navigation.css comments.css forms.css fields.css print.css ie.css ie6.css
Drupal's CSS optimization, once turned on, will roll all of these up for you automatically, so if you aren't using Drupal you will need some sort of build system to combine and minimize everything. But I think this is a good start.
On a side note, I really like the method the Zen theme uses for CSS columns. Worth checking that out as well.
To be honest. With firebug's ability to tell me what line and css files the style on an element is coming from I don't find spending a lot of time on organization to have a ton of benefit.
I typically generate css with php, usually in the header but sometimes in a linked file. Using this method I can easily alter site wide color or fonts, etc or feed the style atrributes from a database. This method also allows me to create blocks of css for different page elements and include them as needed - forms, menus, etc - or dynamically include definitions when conditions are met. This offers a lot of flexibility in terms of organizing and making changes to the css.
I tend to build all my DOM in object oriented javascript, and always give the root element of a UI component the same class name as the name of the JavaScript class. See eg https://github.com/marcuswestin/Focus/blob/master/js/ui/pane.... The CSS selectors then mirror the structure of thr JavaScript files as well as the hierarchy of the resulting UI.
I use 4 stylesheets:
- reset (duh) - layout (structural stuff) - typography (general typegraphic styles) - styles (stuff gets prettier than the already are).
As for the grouping o selectors, i try not to reuse much code so cascading will not mess stuff up, i'd rather make big css than fragile css. I also try to group code on a per section basis… just remember i do have a typography stylesheet which makes most of the stuff readable and pretty before the glitz rolls in.
My colleague @camslizzle just put out http://stacklayout.com/ - it's pretty new but it has a lot of promise I think and has received some favourable comments around twitter and here on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/g3p9d/introducin...
i saw one guy's css once it it looks like:
the indentation was well done..wrapper { ... } .sidebar { ... } .content { ... }The best suggestion I can give is to break up your CSS into multiple files. If you have a "projects" page, make a "projects" CSS file for style definitions specific to that page. I keep the overall layout elements together. I typically also have a "forms" CSS file just for buttons, form layouts, and inputs.
Then @import everything in screen.css.
Organizing the CSS is not a big matter, giving the correct name to the class and id will lead smart way to organize
I use a single file for each type of media (screen, print ...). Each file has general styles first (HTML tags), IDs of layout boxes, classes to fine-tune formatting, and overrides at the bottom (if needed). I like to keep spacing for readability (maybe minify the files when I'm finished).
http://andreidraganescu.info/blog/1
I use this system for about 4 years and am still delighted on how easy it comes to me. In brief:
- Split up your style sheet according to rule types.
- There are three main rule types that help when split: grid, decorations and fonts.
Sometimes it's better to inline a style than to put it in a separate file.
I think when you find yourself writing nested selectors that are heavily dependent on the HTML structure, it's an indication that your code could be less fragile if you just used the HTML style attribute instead.
LESS CSS seems worth a look: http://lesscss.org/
I try to code CSS starting with generic, going down to specific
Eg. Files would be something like:
* reset * global (eg header/footer) * common (stuff used most places but not all, eg. forms) * specific to section of the site * specific to the page
Just run it through ProCSSor (http://procssor.com or http://css.tl). Lots of options.
How I do it: 1 File. Single line styling. Order: Reset, html/body, header, container, footer, misc (h1, p, span, input). Indent (ie: #header { } -newline+tab- #header p {}
Here's an example of a super organized CSS, with table-of-contents, https://www.mint.com/css/rd/mint.css
here's a simple way I organizate my CSS:
1. reset.css 2. global.css - reusable classes and styles for common selectors (html, body, a, etc) 3. css named per page (or type of a page) - ex. home.css / about.css / results.css / static.css
* I usually add a class / id to the body and use that as my first selector on the page-level css. This allows me to combine all + minify for production
not really sure every way suits all but if it's kept as clean as possible & organised it's always best.
Personaly i keep everything to do with each area to gether ie. Header, footer, I wouldn't seperate out the <h> &
tags & place all the
's together.
if i'm working on a large site i tend to seperate out the css by section home, Base template (about for example), contact, blog, news, shop...
ySlow recommends at most 3 stylesheets, and with good reason: the HTML headers and request times can drastically slow a site down.
By simply organizing the structure of the file well, you can have a easy to navigate css file. Of course there may be a few extra style sheets; ie.css, section specific.css, print.css and mobile.css.
Here's my CSS file structure:
-reset
-html tags h1,p,q etc
-header
-navigation
-content
-sidebar
-misc (popups, forms, buttons)
-footer
Lots of comments really help, especially when you look at it months after.
I just use Blueprint.
I do it by widget and layout.