100 words 051

I’ve been thinking about what Harry said recently about logic in CSS. I think he makes an astute observation.

You can think of each part of a selector as a condition:

condition { }

That translates to code like:

if (condition) { }

So if you have a CSS selector like this:

condition1 condition2 condition3 { }

…it translates to code like this:

if (condition1) {
    if (condition2) {
        if (condition3) {
        }
    }
}

That doesn’t feel very elegant, even in its simpler form:

if (condition1 && condition2 && condition3) { }

I like Harry’s rule of thumb:

Think of your selectors as mini programs: Every time you nest or qualify, you are adding an if statement; read these ifs out loud to yourself to try and keep your selectors sane.