HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Good CSS frameworks provide you with a solid starting point for your
designs, cutting down your time spent developing, testing, tweaking, and
updating. They can also reduce the time others (your team members or
those who inherit your sites) spend modifying your CSS, as everyone is
working from a standard set of conventions. Frameworks can make your
designs more modular by giving you a standard set of classes that can be
reused from page to page easily, breaking the styles down into separate
sheets that can be applied independently to pages on an as-needed basis,
or allowing you to plug in various types of content without needing to invent
new classes for it.
But, frameworks have their share of problems too. For instance, publicly-
distributed (as opposed to your own private) frameworks tend to have large
file sizes, as they need to work for any type of site with any type of content;
if they're separated into multiple sheets, they can further damage page
speed since every HTTP request takes time. We won't get into the full list of
pros and cons here, but there are ways to work around many of them, so
check out the following articles for the details.
OBJECT-ORIENTED CSS (OOCSS)
Nicole Sullivan coined the term object-oriented CSS (OOCSS) for her
method of creating self-contained chunks of HTML (modules) that can be
reused anywhere in the page or site and that any class can be applied to.
Some of the main principles of OOCSS are:
• using primarily classes instead of IDs
• creating default classes with multiple, more specific classes added on to
elements
• avoiding dependent selectors and class names that are location-specific
