via ajaxian:

CSS is pretty central to Ajax, and large Ajax projects often have a lot of CSS to deal with, so it’s worthwhile asking how to maintain all of it. Garrett Dimon’s Architecting CSS is a good set of advice for structuring your CSS files (from July, 2005; unearthed on Digg).

The article identifies three ways to organise your stylesheets:

• Archetype-Based A stylesheet for each class of page, e.g. homepage stylesheet, article stylesheet, etc.
• Page Element/Section-Based A stylesheet for each class of page section, e.g. header stylesheet, sidebar stylesheet.
• Tag-Based Similar to the previous approach, but based around tags, e.g. form stylesheet, table stylesheet.

Other topics include:

• Including stylesheets with @include
• Deciding how much to rely on selectors (Redundancy vs Dependency)
• Use of comments
• Use of !important
• Alphabetizing attributes to ensure you don’t forget any

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 1:16 pm and is filed under CSS, Scriptactulous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.