CSS-Off contest results are in over at CSS-Tricks.com
Soooo….first, here is a link to the results page. Hats off to Chris Coyier for setting it up, and for him and Doug on the judging. I know that must have taken a ton of work. Seriously, deciding on those would have driven me nuts cause they all pretty much look the same.
With that out of the way, let me say that I have learned I do NOT have the time to actually try and compete in a contest like that. There was way too much detail that they were looking for, which I deemed not really important when I created mine, and I was not willing to put in the time that the winners were. I didn’t pay attention to line-height in the paragraphs, I didn’t add the CSS3 styles for text shadows…and a few other small things like that. What I DID do, is make sure I used text instead of images, it didn’t break in any browser (more important to me), used SOME CSS3 properties, it scaled if you added more text to anything, and used @font-face for the unsupported fonts they used in the psd file.
So if the winners come here, bravo to you guys. You obviously did a great freakin’ job.
One of the categories was confusing to me, and it brings up something I am curious about from anyone who reads this. Semantics. I take this to mean how you name your classes/ids and such. Personally, I go with divs with names like: header, nav, content, left, right, and footer. For classes, I tend to not be really specific. Well…not at all really. If I need a specific link to be red, my class is .red. NOT class=”secondLink_staffPage_redRollOver”.
I think this is because I rely on Firebug/Developer a lot, and names don’t really matter. I deal a lot with web apps and sites using the Ext javascript library, which throws a lot of dynamic crap in on the fly, and has ids like “ex-box-49-b4″. What does that mean? NOOOO freakin’ idea, and I don’t care. I just need to find the div, and style it. Maybe its my work environment that has led me to be like that. The names just don’t matter much. I do the basics, and keep going.
Should I get more specific so others can read it? With tools like Firebug, and people’s ability to read html/css, does it matter? I don’t know. How specific should a developer be? Should you be able to look at a style in a css file and know exactly what it pertains to?
I find that I don’t have the time at work to think like that. I need the site done, and I need it done as soon as possible, and it needs to work. Now. Maybe though, I should take the time to name things more clearly so it is easier for others. The thing is, the people I work with, they also use Firebug, or something like it at least, and they know how to find what they are looking for. We don’t need anyone else to figure out what the hell we are doing, just as long as all of us do.
Thoughts?
Tags: CSS
Semantics, just like all good coding habits, is about being versatile. I don’t use Firebug. Granted, I’ve read a lot of good things about it and I’m considering it, but I don’t use it, which means it’s possible someone else doesn’t use it either. If you plan on staying on the team you are on now for the rest of your entire life, then I guess semantics don’t really apply to you. If you ever plan on trying to go somewhere else, they could easily expect more semantic code out of you.
But as long as you set your code up well enough to be easily adjusted by members from your team a year from implementation, then there’s no problem.
But I also believe that code that works isn’t necessarily good code.
Good post.
“But I also believe that code that works isn’t necessarily good code.”
This is unbelievably true!
Sometimes though, that is all the time you are allowed.