[thelist] your opinion solicited on coding specs I requested from contractor

[Tara Cleveland]

Except, if you are using the same look, for 20 different purposes, you end up with
a very confusing style sheet. Also, if you want to repurpose the style sheet for
another section of the site, or a site with the same look, you have to totally
re-create the style sheet, and you've got to keep track of all of the different
uses.

I worked for a company that built web apps for other companies. We had a ton of
freelancers in. Each created the style sheets in their own special way. Boy what a
headache. On top of that, each time we did a new version of the app, it didn't
match with the style sheet. Terminology changed, and the specs changed, so what was
once, class="reports-title", was in the next version class="reporting-title" and in
the next version class="stats-title" etc. etc. Believe me it became frustrating to
use "logical" (they didn't stay logical for long) names for a description of a
style. This is why I don't recommend using the logical names for complex or
sprawling sites/apps etc. By the same token "smallred" should either be obvious or
a bit more descriptive or it could be a mix of the two (smallred-subtitle) if you
are confident that smallred won't be used for many different purposes.

The important thing is to choose one scheme of naming styles. And have everyone
adhere to it all of the time - so they aren't using smallred-subtitles for email
links, like

<a href="mailto:kookabura at oldgumtree.com" class="smallred-subtitle">

or something. Then, it is much easier to sort out later.

Oh yah and we couldn't use IDs because often the programmers used them for their
magical programming stuff that they do... at least that's what we were told.  ;-)

Rgds,

Tara Cleveland

Sam-I-Am wrote:

> the class name, like the markup, should be logical rather than physical.
> My pet peeve is classes like .smallred { } .. when I come back to
> implement a redesign I'm left with a load of non-sensical classnames. I
> would rather it be .note {} or .errorMsg {}, or something that tells me
> what the style is for, and not include presentation specifics.