My question is different than this one, but it's regarding the same principle, so this quote is relevant here too:
from https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/wiki
Essentially, this means “rarely use location-dependent styles”. An object should look the same no matter where you put it. So instead of styling a specific h2 with .myObject h2 {...}, create and apply a class that describes the h2 in question, like h2 class="category".
But what if the design dictates that an object's style changes when it's inside certain containers? Here's a simplified example of my problem. Let's say there's an object called foo, and a container object called bar. foo and bar have their own location-independent styles:
.foo {
...
}
.bar {
...
}
But when foo is inside container bar like so, its color needs to change when the user hovers over bar:
<div class="bar">
...
<div class="foo">
...
</div>
...
</div>
It seems in this case, you can't avoid writing a location-dependent selector that looks like this:
.bar:hover .foo {
// color style
}
One solution I thought of is to introduce a class that's explicitly dependent on bar (named using BEM naming convention to be explicit about parent-child relationship), and add it to the foo object:
<div class="bar">
...
<div class="foo bar__foo">
...
</div>
...
</div>
.bar:hover .bar__foo {
// color style
}
I want to confirm, is this a good way to handle the issue? Are there other ways in OOCSS as well?
The big concern here isn't that your chaining classes together, it's that your classes are location independent. Nesting is going to happen. Approaches like OOCSS are great because they help to you know when things like nesting and class-naming is going awry.
Mark Otto released a Code Guide last week and here are some relevant points:
Keep selectors short and strive to limit the number of elements in each selector to three.
Scope classes to the closest parent only when necessary (e.g., when not using prefixed classes).
He also provides these examples:
/* Bad example */
span { ... }
.page-container #stream .stream-item .tweet .tweet-header .username { ... }
.avatar { ... }
/* Good example */
.avatar { ... }
.tweet-header .username { ... }
.tweet .avatar { ... }
In short: Aim to scope a class to it's parent. Don't go further than 3 selectors.
You're fine going with:
.bar:hover .foo { ... }
Further Reading
Stop The Cascade
Scope CSS Classes with Prefixes
Related
I know CSS selector with the highest specificity takes precedence (i.e. .classname < #idname).
I also know that if things are the same specificity, then the last statement called takes precedence:
.classname1 { color: red; }
.classname1 { color: blue; } // classname1 color will be blue
Does the ordering of HTML classes on a DOM element affect the statement priority?
I have to disagree slightly with Jon and Watson's answers, as...
Yes, it Can (depending on the statement)
Your question is:
Does the ordering of CSS classes on a DOM element affect the statement priority?
Which does depend on the statement in question.
HTML Ordering Does Not Typically Matter
The following are equivalent when it comes to a straight call to a class (i.e. .class1 or .class2) or to a combined call (i.e. .class1.class2 or .class2.class1):
<div class="class1 class2"></div>
<div class="class2 class1"></div>
Cases Where Statement Priority for above HTML Can be Affected Based on HTML Order
The main place where ordering in HTML matters is with the use of attribute selectors in your CSS.
Example 1 Fiddle using the following code seeking to match attribute value will NOT have any change in font color, and each div will have different properties because of the ordering of the classes:
[class="class1"] {
color: red;
}
[class="class1 class2"] {
background-color: yellow;
}
[class="class2 class1"] {
border: 1px solid blue;
}
Example 2 Fiddle using the following code seeking to match beginning of attribute value will NOT have any change in font color for the second div, and each div will have different properties because of the ordering of the classes:
[class^="class1"] {
color: red;
}
[class^="class1 class2"] {
background-color: yellow;
}
[class^="class2 class1"] {
border: 1px solid blue;
}
Example 3 Fiddle using the following code seeking to match end of attribute value will NOT have any change in font color for the first div, and each div will have different properties because of the ordering of the classes:
[class$="class1"] {
color: red;
}
[class$="class1 class2"] {
background-color: yellow;
}
[class$="class2 class1"] {
border: 1px solid blue;
}
A Clarifying Statement about "Priority"
To be clear, in the cases above, what is affected as far as "statement priority" is concerned is really a matter of whether the statement actually applies or not to the element. But since the application or not is in a sense, the basic priority, and since the above are cases where such application is actually based on the ordering of the classes on the HTML Dom element (rather than the presence or absence of the class), I thought it worth adding this as an answer.
Possible Valid Use of Class Ordering?
This is a thought occurring to me, based on BoltClock's comment. Consider just two classes being used to style elements based on whatever factors are deemed critical to different styling. These two classes theoretically can replace the use of eleven different individual classes using the combination of attribute selectors (actually, as will be noted later, the possibilities are almost limitless with but a single class, but I'll discuss that in a moment since this post is about ordering of multiple classes). For these two classes we can style elements differently as follows:
Assuming these HTML Combinations
<div class="class1">Element 1</div>
<div class="class2">Element 2</div>
<div class="class1 class2">Element 3</div>
<div class="class2 class1">Element 4</div>
CSS Possibilities
/* simply has the class */
.class1 {} /* affects elements 1, 3, 4 */
.class2 {} /* affects elements 2-4 */
/* has only a single class */
[class="class1"] {} /* affects element 1 only */
[class="class2"] {} /* affects element 2 only */
/* simply has both classes */
.class1.class2 {} /* affects elements 3-4 */
/* has both classes, but in a particular order */
[class="class1 class2"] {} /* affects element 3 only */
[class="class2 class1"] {} /* affects element 4 only */
/* begins with a class */
[class^="class1"] {} /* affects elements 1 & 3 only */
[class^="class2"] {} /* affects elements 2 & 4 only */
/* ends with a class
NOTE: that with only two classes, this is the reverse of the above and is somewhat
superfluous; however, if a third class is introduced, then the beginning and ending
class combinations become more relevant.
*/
[class$="class1"] {} /* affects elements 2 & 4 only */
[class$="class2"] {} /* affects elements 1 & 3 only */
If I calculate right, 3 classes could give at least 40 combinations of selector options.
To clarify my note about "limitless" possibilities, given the right logic, a single class can potentially have imbedded in it code combinations that are looked for via the [attr*=value] syntax.
Is all this too complex to manage? Possibly. That may depend on the logic of exactly how it is implemented. The point I am trying to bring out is that it is possible with CSS3 to have ordering of classes be significant if one desired it and planned for it, and it might not be horribly wrong to be utilizing the power of CSS in that way.
No, it does not. The relevant part of the W3C standard makes no mention of the order of appearance for classes.
No, it does not, like you said, if two rules have the same specificity, the one that comes later in your CSS will be applied.
No. But if you want to make one of your declaration blocks to has more precedence (w/o many !importants) make its selector more specific.
For example, for a div:
div.classname1 { color: red; } /* classname1 color will be red (for `div`s) */
.classname1 { color: blue; }
What's missing or a little hard to find in other answers is this:
What matters is the order in which the browser reads/parses the class names
The class defined last will win
.a {
color: red;
}
.b {
color: blue;
}
<div class="a b">This text will be blue</div>
<div class="b a">This text will ALSO be blue</div>
Example comes from this source
May be affected by the order of your imports
Because if this you may need to pay attention to how you import CSS in your files.
For example in my JavaScript based project I have a component that I can pass extra classes to. In order for my own classes to overwrite styles of the classes of the component itself I need to first import the component I wish to style (which will import its own styles) and only then import my own styles:
//import the component first, which will import css
import {SomeComponent} from 'some-library/SomeComponent';
//And THEN our own styles
import './styles.css';
return <SomeComponent className={myClassName} />
Like this my buildprocess (Webpack) will put my own classes later in the CSS bundle than the components ones.
So I am building a react application and have a quick question. If I have two separate components:
and
with CSS classes navigation.css and navigationLogo.css respectively. In navigation.css I have a class named .main and in navigationLogo.css I want to have a class like so:
.main .main_in_logo {
color: red;
}
But with CSS Modules I am unable to do this, any ideas on a work around?
I just feel that the explanations here are not complete enough. In css you do .parentSelector .childSelector in order to select the child. The same rule is for css modules, but in your html/jsx you should add to the parent and the child the relevant className -> styles.parentSelector , styles.childSelector.
<div className={styles.container}>text</div>
This way you can have in your css something like:
.banner .container{
background-color:reb;
}
.banner .container{
background-color:blue;
}
Sometimes you use libraries and you want to change something somewhere down the DOM inside the library and you can't change its source code. In this case you can use the :global like this:
.parentElement :global(div)
.parentElement :global(#some-lib-element-selector)
I was looking for the same problem and didn't find the solution here, maybe because the post is 3 years old. The accepted answer is, in my opinion but not mine only, not scalable.
I don't really know if this is something new, but I found out what I would do in vanilla CSS adapted to CSS modules.
Here is what I did and fully suits my needs:
/* parent.css */
.main {
...some CSS...
}
/* logo.css */
#value main from "./parent.css";
.logo {
...some CSS...
}
.main .logo {
color: red
}
Here, we are using #value, which is a CSS modules variable and allows us to bind with another file to build a selector including the final name of the parent "main".
As strange as it looks to me, it took some time to find out about this solution, I hope this will save some time and help other people!
Why you need to create .main .main_in_logo - the main idea of styles with parent elements its not to broke your css with other styles in the future. But its impossible with css modules, because your styles will be unique forever.
But even you really need it you can use global css for these 2 components - documentation about global css for react-css-modules.
The child component should not have a css rule that is dependent upon the parent css classname.
the child should just be:
.main_in_logo { color: red; }
If you need to define styles that involve both parent and child, then the easiest way is to define the styles completely in the parent:
/* navigation.css */
.main .main_in_logo {
color: red;
}
Then have the parent pass the css class to the child and tell the child to use it:
// Navigation.js
<NavigationLogo className={navigationCss.main_in_logo} />
// NavigationLogo.js
<div className={"foo " + this.props.className}>stuff</div>
You don't need to be specify which child class you are referring to when using CSS modules in ReactjS.
so doing:
.main_in_logo {
color: red;
}
will be enough in the stylesheet.
I ended up using CSS the normal way but with BEM convention.
I mean after all, what the CSS modules do is adding the [this_name].module.css to your css classes anyway. If you typed it correctly in the first place, there's no need of using this. It's just a new abstract that allow newbies so they can just do stuff without having to worry about class names clashing.
// Main.jsx
import './Main.css'
import Logo from './Logo.jsx'
const Main = () => {
return (
<div className="main">
<Logo className="main__logo" />
</div>
)
}
/* Main.css */
.main {/* do magic */}
.main__logo {/* do magic but for Logo component */}
So maybe you had Logo component like this..
// Logo.jsx
import './Logo.css'
const Logo = () => {
return (
<div className="logo">
<img className="logo__img" />
</div>
)
}
/* Logo.css */
.logo {/* do magic for logo */}
.logo__img {/* do magic for logo's image */}
This feels much more natural.
I have a common element which contains articles, and want to treat all but the first child differently as follows:
.listing{
article{
// Some styles
}
article:not(:first-child){
// Some more styles
}
}
All well and good. However on some listings they should all be treated the same, so I don't want to include the article:not(:first-child) selector, it needs to be like the following:
.listing.alt{
article{
// Some styles
// Some more styles
}
}
How can I combine these two rules without repeating everything?
Ok I think I've figured it out using Sass:
.listing{
article{
// Generic Styles
}
&.alt article,
&:not(.alt) article:not(:first-child){
// More Styles
}
}
I also see that my original code example was a bit weird so I've updated it so it's a bit more correct.
HTML
<div class="listing">
<article>1</article>
<article>2</article>
<article>3</article>
</div>
<div class="listing alt">
<article>1</article>
<article>2</article>
<article>3</article>
</div>
CSS
.listing:not(.alt) article:not(:first-child) {color:gainsboro;}
Updated demo
I have tried to combine to classes in CSS, but I end up failing. I used this code:
.container{
.ningbar
}
What I would like to do is combine the items in the ningbar layer with the items in the container layer. Thanks, Phineas.
This would do the job:
.container { /*container rules*/ }
.ningbar { /*ningbar rules*/ }
.container,.ningbar { /*shared rules*/ }
.container, .ningbar { }
Use the same rules for both.
why do you want to combine two classes ? I would make two seperate classes and use them in my controls as below
CSS:
.class1{
/* All styles for class1*/
}
.class2{
/* All styles for class2*/
}
HTML:
<div class="class1 class2"></div>
This way you can add both classes to your controls/DOM elements keeping them seperate in your CSS.
In order to use another styles' for another class, there is LESS, if I can say.
In a nutshell, LESS will help you to maintain more easily, and comprehensible your styles' files. You will be able to add variables, to avoid repetitions of same colors' codes, for instance.
You can view more detail on LESS's website : http://lesscss.org/
But, it's probably a complicated way, to simply add properties from another class.
For Combining two class you can us
.Class1 .Class2 {
//All style for combination of these two classes
}
I know CSS selector with the highest specificity takes precedence (i.e. .classname < #idname).
I also know that if things are the same specificity, then the last statement called takes precedence:
.classname1 { color: red; }
.classname1 { color: blue; } // classname1 color will be blue
Does the ordering of HTML classes on a DOM element affect the statement priority?
I have to disagree slightly with Jon and Watson's answers, as...
Yes, it Can (depending on the statement)
Your question is:
Does the ordering of CSS classes on a DOM element affect the statement priority?
Which does depend on the statement in question.
HTML Ordering Does Not Typically Matter
The following are equivalent when it comes to a straight call to a class (i.e. .class1 or .class2) or to a combined call (i.e. .class1.class2 or .class2.class1):
<div class="class1 class2"></div>
<div class="class2 class1"></div>
Cases Where Statement Priority for above HTML Can be Affected Based on HTML Order
The main place where ordering in HTML matters is with the use of attribute selectors in your CSS.
Example 1 Fiddle using the following code seeking to match attribute value will NOT have any change in font color, and each div will have different properties because of the ordering of the classes:
[class="class1"] {
color: red;
}
[class="class1 class2"] {
background-color: yellow;
}
[class="class2 class1"] {
border: 1px solid blue;
}
Example 2 Fiddle using the following code seeking to match beginning of attribute value will NOT have any change in font color for the second div, and each div will have different properties because of the ordering of the classes:
[class^="class1"] {
color: red;
}
[class^="class1 class2"] {
background-color: yellow;
}
[class^="class2 class1"] {
border: 1px solid blue;
}
Example 3 Fiddle using the following code seeking to match end of attribute value will NOT have any change in font color for the first div, and each div will have different properties because of the ordering of the classes:
[class$="class1"] {
color: red;
}
[class$="class1 class2"] {
background-color: yellow;
}
[class$="class2 class1"] {
border: 1px solid blue;
}
A Clarifying Statement about "Priority"
To be clear, in the cases above, what is affected as far as "statement priority" is concerned is really a matter of whether the statement actually applies or not to the element. But since the application or not is in a sense, the basic priority, and since the above are cases where such application is actually based on the ordering of the classes on the HTML Dom element (rather than the presence or absence of the class), I thought it worth adding this as an answer.
Possible Valid Use of Class Ordering?
This is a thought occurring to me, based on BoltClock's comment. Consider just two classes being used to style elements based on whatever factors are deemed critical to different styling. These two classes theoretically can replace the use of eleven different individual classes using the combination of attribute selectors (actually, as will be noted later, the possibilities are almost limitless with but a single class, but I'll discuss that in a moment since this post is about ordering of multiple classes). For these two classes we can style elements differently as follows:
Assuming these HTML Combinations
<div class="class1">Element 1</div>
<div class="class2">Element 2</div>
<div class="class1 class2">Element 3</div>
<div class="class2 class1">Element 4</div>
CSS Possibilities
/* simply has the class */
.class1 {} /* affects elements 1, 3, 4 */
.class2 {} /* affects elements 2-4 */
/* has only a single class */
[class="class1"] {} /* affects element 1 only */
[class="class2"] {} /* affects element 2 only */
/* simply has both classes */
.class1.class2 {} /* affects elements 3-4 */
/* has both classes, but in a particular order */
[class="class1 class2"] {} /* affects element 3 only */
[class="class2 class1"] {} /* affects element 4 only */
/* begins with a class */
[class^="class1"] {} /* affects elements 1 & 3 only */
[class^="class2"] {} /* affects elements 2 & 4 only */
/* ends with a class
NOTE: that with only two classes, this is the reverse of the above and is somewhat
superfluous; however, if a third class is introduced, then the beginning and ending
class combinations become more relevant.
*/
[class$="class1"] {} /* affects elements 2 & 4 only */
[class$="class2"] {} /* affects elements 1 & 3 only */
If I calculate right, 3 classes could give at least 40 combinations of selector options.
To clarify my note about "limitless" possibilities, given the right logic, a single class can potentially have imbedded in it code combinations that are looked for via the [attr*=value] syntax.
Is all this too complex to manage? Possibly. That may depend on the logic of exactly how it is implemented. The point I am trying to bring out is that it is possible with CSS3 to have ordering of classes be significant if one desired it and planned for it, and it might not be horribly wrong to be utilizing the power of CSS in that way.
No, it does not. The relevant part of the W3C standard makes no mention of the order of appearance for classes.
No, it does not, like you said, if two rules have the same specificity, the one that comes later in your CSS will be applied.
No. But if you want to make one of your declaration blocks to has more precedence (w/o many !importants) make its selector more specific.
For example, for a div:
div.classname1 { color: red; } /* classname1 color will be red (for `div`s) */
.classname1 { color: blue; }
What's missing or a little hard to find in other answers is this:
What matters is the order in which the browser reads/parses the class names
The class defined last will win
.a {
color: red;
}
.b {
color: blue;
}
<div class="a b">This text will be blue</div>
<div class="b a">This text will ALSO be blue</div>
Example comes from this source
May be affected by the order of your imports
Because if this you may need to pay attention to how you import CSS in your files.
For example in my JavaScript based project I have a component that I can pass extra classes to. In order for my own classes to overwrite styles of the classes of the component itself I need to first import the component I wish to style (which will import its own styles) and only then import my own styles:
//import the component first, which will import css
import {SomeComponent} from 'some-library/SomeComponent';
//And THEN our own styles
import './styles.css';
return <SomeComponent className={myClassName} />
Like this my buildprocess (Webpack) will put my own classes later in the CSS bundle than the components ones.