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dmerand profile image
Donald Merand

Depending on the scale of the app, I'm not sure it's necessary to hang your hat on semantic CSS. If the app is small, having, for example, a functional CSS approach allows you to just say "I want the corners rounded here, add the corner rounding class." In larger apps, you're probably going to end up using server-generated partials, or components of some sort, or functional generation, and in any of those cases it's easy to define style at a higher level than CSS.

This might be why it's common to dislike BEM - because it's solving a problem at a middle-level scale. It's too big for small apps, and not big enough for big apps.

BTW this article has an amazing analysis of rampant CSS class reuse/abuse on big web sites. It's worth a read for sure.

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Alain Van Hout

Indeed an amazing read!

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Ben Sinclair

I read that just now and I'm not sure what it's getting at. It seems to be saying "because I can't get X to work and because Big Company Y don't seem to care, I don't need to care either".

I followed on to the "mic drop" semantic-CSS article and agree more with that one.

 
dmerand profile image
Donald Merand

@muppling I think you're definitely right that caring is the magic ingredient, regardless of which approach one uses. Without that, no CSS heuristic or framework or approach is going to save you.