CSS Architecture - Standards?

I've been doing some research on CSS Architecture/Standards, and have come up rather dry.   After spending a few hours hammering google with various keywords etc I can't find a single entity publishing any guidelines/standards for CSS development.  What I mean by that is CSS architecture as it pertains to the UI development, not the standards of the specification.  For example, is it best to use ID declarations for objects, or classes, etc.   Has anyone seen anything or read anything that talks about UI architecture using CSS? 

3 Comments

  • This is interesting as the slashdotters et al are hammering away at the IE Blog for them to implement CSS standards.



    James

  • There is no such thing as "standards" when it comes to CSS usage.



    Just as you will get 10 different opinions on how to design an object oriented system, you will get 10 different opinions on how to design your CSS from 10 different people.



    Some people will tell you to use tableless layouts and claim that anything else is a perversion of HTML. Others will say why go through the trouble of emulating table-like behavior with DIVs when tables work perfectly fine, are much more efficient in terms of dev time, and behave nicer for certain tasks.



    It's all a matter of pragmatics, which is dependent on what your values are on the project you're working on.



    To me, using CSS effectively is an art form. Mastery comes from a deep understanding of browsers, HTML, DOM, and lots of experience with what works and what does not.



    The key is to be consistent and come up with a "philosophy" that is appropriate for the project you are working on; using CSS effectively takes time contraints, compatability constraints, skill constraints, and necessity contraints into account and comes up with a balance of elegance in implementation and practicality in terms of development costs (time or $$).



    Hope this helps :)

  • Appreciate the feedback. We have quite a bit of experience, what I was more looking for are some resources on other peoples design/architecture experience to validate some of our architectural decisions. I'll grab that book and give it a read.



    Cheers.

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