Jack Zerby

Sean and I figured out a quick way to put a transparent background around an item to call attention to it. 

Try this:

.yourdiv { outline:1000px solid rgba(0,0,0,.5) }

Haven’t tested in older IE versions, but this is a pretty cool css hack.

I admit it. I am insane about naming and organization when it comes to web development. I’ve learned the hard way that poor naming and organization can lead to huge problems as an application grows. We have rewritten both Flavors.me and Goodsie.com 2 or 3 times from the ground up for this very reason.

Prefixes

The best way I’ve found to organize the css from different parts of your site, is to create persistent prefixes that are used on every class name within any large section of your site. In Goodsie we have 3 prefixes,

"sh-" (used on admin, homepage, and misc)
"st-" (used on store)
"gl-" (used on both store and admin)

I use 3 css files. sh.css, st.css, and gl.css to keep all the classes separate.

Class names and cascading

I used to write my css styles like this:

#navigation ul li { color:red; }
#navigation ul li a { color:orange; }
#navigation ul li a b { color:yellow; }

There were two problems with this approach.

• Browsers read css from right to left, so on my 3rd line of code, the browser had to scan thousands of lines of html to find every b tag, then every a tag, then li, etc… Although this is true, the impact on performance is quite negligible according to Steve Souders:

  Based on these tests I have the following hypothesis: For most web sites, the possible performance gains from optimizing CSS selectors will be small, and are not worth the costs. There are some types of CSS rules and interactions with JavaScript that can make a page noticeably slower. This is where the focus should be. Performance Impact of CSS Selectors

• The bigger reason why this css structure is bad is when changing classnames in Javascript that I didn’t write (even some that I did), I frequently would break the js by change the tag to something else. If I decided to change that a tag into an span tag the js would break.

This is how I write my css classes now:

.gl-nav { }
.gl-nav-logo { }
.gl-nav-title { }
-gl-nav-description { }

There are several advantages to this approach.

• I can search for a class name sitewide in the js and be able to find it pretty quickly.
• It creates a consistent naming structure that is easily readable.
• Performance-wise the browser doesn’t have to work hard to find the element.

Future proofing

If I name something “.navigation”, at the time there may only be one type of navigation. What happens when you add subnavigation, and navigation inside of navigation? The way I prevent for this to make sure each classname has some sort of traceable context. Let’s take the class .gl-nav-title { }.

• It’s prefix is global (“gl-“), so it resides in my gl.css file.
• It is a nav
• It is the title for the nav

You may be thinking that using .navigation is not so bad when you have an id in front. (ex. #site-nav .navigation). This is perfectly fine, but can create issues of which I’ll address next.

Keeping JS and CSS apart

A site like Flavors.me has 30-40,000 lines of js. When making CSS changes, it was very difficult to make sure all the js files were updated with my sweeping changes (which our devs will admit I do frequently). We decided a few months ago to get rid of as many css classes from the js as we could. (that were related to style only). When the js needed a class to refer to an html tag, we would add a “js-” prefix to the tag. Here’s an example: This structure allows me change the gl-nav class name without affecting the js. This has worked out amazingly well and I rarely break anything. (most of the time). We got rid of all id’s in the css as well. If I need anything that’s not a reusable class (ex. a one-off banner), I’ll use the prefix “-sp” (specific). This may all seem pretty OCD to some, but to anyone who has worked on large sites, organization is absolutely vital to keeping things running smoothly and efficiently.

In early 2010, Birdman formed an oil and gas exploration company, Bronald Oil and Gas, LLC. The company was a joint venture founded by Birdman and his brother Slim, and the name was a combination of the brothers’ first names, Bryan and Ronald. Evidence of the company’s actual business operations was scant, limited mostly to a website and the appearance of a “pumpjack” tattoo on the side of Birdman’s head.^[16] The website indicated that the company’s strategy would be to first develop existing land holdings and seek out new oil and gas leases. In February 2010, Birdman toldOzone magazine that he had been in the oil business for “4 or 5 years” and was “making good money off that”.^[17] However, by March 2010, Birdman had almost completely covered the pumpjack tattoo, which sparked speculation that the Bronald Oil project had stalled.^[18] As of January 22, 2012, the Bronald Oil website is no longer operational.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birdman_(entertainer)