She used this approach at Facebook (and Yahoo, I think?) to successfully tidy up a huge code base of thousands of CSS files down to a more manageable few.
I attended her workshop at Webstock and since then had a chance to put it into practice on a 'get it up quick' green fields project (http://chchneeds.org.nz). I must say I was really pleasantly surprised at the way this approach just avoids a lot of the pain points, as a web developer/coder (ie not an html/css guru) I so often face when just getting the simplest things to 'work'.
I guess the hardest thing for me to get my head around to was that to make things more modular you had to let go (a tiny bit) of being so religious about 'semantic html' as a requirement for the HTML, but I think its worth it to get your CSS a whole lot more modular and 'pluggable' together.
Still a bit more work to do, IMHO, but I'm definitely going to be monitoring this project closely.
I'm really interested in the OOCSS approach, it's efficient, maintainable and modular, and although it's not perfectly semantic the trade-off is minimal. I first discovered it from the Velocity 2009 conference, and Nicole Sullivan's talk from Web Directions North - http://goo.gl/yLkby
She used this approach at Facebook (and Yahoo, I think?) to successfully tidy up a huge code base of thousands of CSS files down to a more manageable few.
I attended her workshop at Webstock and since then had a chance to put it into practice on a 'get it up quick' green fields project (http://chchneeds.org.nz). I must say I was really pleasantly surprised at the way this approach just avoids a lot of the pain points, as a web developer/coder (ie not an html/css guru) I so often face when just getting the simplest things to 'work'.
I guess the hardest thing for me to get my head around to was that to make things more modular you had to let go (a tiny bit) of being so religious about 'semantic html' as a requirement for the HTML, but I think its worth it to get your CSS a whole lot more modular and 'pluggable' together.
Still a bit more work to do, IMHO, but I'm definitely going to be monitoring this project closely.
Nicole Sullivan's site: http://www.stubbornella.org/content/