HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Decoupling HTML From CSS
Jonathan Snook
For years, the Web standards community has talked about the separation of
concerns. Separate your CSS from your JavaScript from your HTML. We all
do that, right? CSS goes into its own file; JavaScript goes in another; HTML
is left by itself, nice and clean.
CSS Zen Garden proved that we can alter a design into a myriad of
permutations simply by changing the CSS. However, we've rarely seen the
flip side of this — the side that is more likely to occur in a project: the HTML
changes. We modify the HTML and then have to go back and revise any
CSS that goes with it.
In this way, we haven't really separated the two, have we? We have to make
our changes in two places.
Exploring Approaches
Over the course of my career, I've had the pleasure and privilege to work on
hundreds of di
"
erent websites and Web applications. For the vast majority
of these projects, I was the sole developer building out the HTML and CSS. I
developed a way of coding websites that worked well for me.
Most recently, I spent two years at Yahoo working on Mail, Messenger,
Calendar and other projects. Working on a much larger project with a much
larger team was a great experience. A small team of prototypers worked
with a larger team of designers to build out all of the HTML and CSS for
multiple teams of engineers.
