The Dublin UX Meetup group is a fantastic resource for anyone working in interaction design.
Last week, they played host to Dr. John Craddock – Head of Development at Adaptemy who spoke about CSS Architecture and how to write and manage CSS for your application.
Dr. Craddock’s talk highlighted the need to refactor your CSS: cut down on bloated code and stop repeating yourself. He also included a note about the dangers of the dreaded specificity wars – a CSS file with !important all over the place is a symptom of this particular ague. In short, CSS should be used as it is intended – reusable blocks with appropriate scale that save time rather than create problems.
Dr. Craddock outlined a few potential philosophies for organising CSS:
- OOCSS – Object Orientated CSS
- SMACSS – Scalable Modular Architecture for CSS
- BEM – Block Element Modifier
He also very kindly shared a video of a talk on CSS Architecture for Single Page Applications that he gave to JavaScript developers last year:
Slides from John’s UX Meetup talk are available on his website.