CSS defines how things should appear on the screen, not how to calculate or execute them.
Summary
In this article, I intend to explore in depth a question that many Front-end developers know well: why CSS is so often a source of frustration and skepticism.
I won’t just retrace its historical problems, but I want to delve into what I consider the fundamental misunderstanding of CSS: the idea that key concepts like the cascade algorithm and specificity are design flaws to be circumvented, perhaps by resorting to frameworks, rather than true foundational features of the language.
To learn to appreciate CSS, I believe it’s essential first and foremost to accept the mechanisms that govern it, from the box model to display, passing through the cascade, and to learn to use them consciously. Only then we can apply the indispensable order and discipline to the structure of our code, aiming to create stylesheets that are not only functional, but above all scalable and with predictable behavior.
Precisely with this goal in mind, towards the conclusion of the article I will present my solution: the Clean CSS Architecture. Inspired by the basic principles of Design Systems and some concepts from Clean Architecture, this proposal of mine offers a structured approach that allows using the intrinsic principles of the cascade in a controlled and predictable way, thus transforming what many see as a weakness into a strength for code maintainability.
Top comments (0)