Update: this question is about global style. So solution such as #some-id .score is NOT a solution.
At first, I was styling as
.score { font-size: 32px; color: #777 }
And the "score" is something that can happen any where, something of a global style. But since other style actually might have:
#summary-panel { font-size: 13px }
The one with id will override the one just having classes (the first CSS rule in this post). (So if score is displayed within summary-panel then the font-size will be overridden to be 13px but the score style is supposed to be global and need a 32px style.) So I was tempted to use
.score { font-size: 32px !important; color: #777 !important }
because the !important can act as the "second level" which override everything ordinary, and act as a global style.
Is this a good way or better way? One catch is that if sometimes we might have a CSS issue with IE 7 (or IE 6), that we need a separate stylesheet such as ie.css, and in there, there might be also
#summary-panel { font-size: 12px !important }
so in this case, the !important will be overridden because the one having an id will always win over just classes. So is there a better way?
Maybe this?
#summary-panel.score { font-size: 32px; }
I guess I'm not sure how many styles you want to add or if the question is how to do this without adding any new styles, in which case I'd say there is not a better way.
This is where you use span.
For example the markup:
<div id="sometext">
<p>Lorem ipsum <span class="score">test</span> dolor sit amet</p>
</div>
And the CSS:
div#sometext {
font-size: 12px;
color: yellow;
}
span.score {
font-size: 42px;
color: green;
}
this question is about global style.
So solution such as #some-id .score
is NOT a solution
[...]
.score is NOT a solution So is there a better way?
there is no answer, all the comments you got in the first answer are valid and polite, but I would tell you as a user, that you should not use !important unless in an emergency to override external code that is outwith your control, !important is for user styles
CSS is a mindset, a suggestion, your request (with a please ;) to the browsers how you would like your styles displayed - at the minute you seem to be struggling between the mindsets
The logical programmer side wants a "global" style, and I believe most programming languages have "globals" ? CSS is not a programming language it's a markup language.
Anyway, the recent last 3-4 years CSS'ers have been encouraged to "class everything" YUI and Blueprint and other frameworks would have us do so.. but that means you should not use ID's because as you rightly point out they override.. they are the ultimate in the CSS Specificity Wars.. BUT as an efficient CSS coder you need to use ID's - that is best practice isn't it? - so if you do need to mix them then you should group your ID selectors and if necessary group the class selectors as was suggested to you
there really is no answer here (except there no such thing as global styling unless you pass it down via ID's and inheritance, it's a coding preference rather than a right/wrong answer
Related
In Bootstrap tutorials, when people create their own Sass variables in a custom style.scss, I see lots of them using trailing !important.
If you want to see an example of what I mean, start at 13:45 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDSkqQft92o&time_continue=24&app=desktop
.navbar {
width: 100%;
background none !important;
#media(max-width: 34em) {
background: black !important;
}
}
But then other code in the .scss file doesn't use !important. No explanation of why that is.
Anyone have some suggestions?
!important means that the style preceding it will be "forced" onto the element, despite what other styles may set on it. For example:
.element {
font-weight: bold;
}
.custom-class {
font-weight: normal !important;
}
If you have an <span class="custom-class element"></span>, it will be displaying a font-weight normal, not bold.
! important guarantees (or at least it tries) that the rule you're trying to apply is more important than others. So it overwrites other rules that might interfere with the new one. ! important is not necessary if the rules are ordered correctly because the last rules prevail over previous ones. ! important must be avoided as much as possible. Use it only if it's really necessary.
On my website, I'm constantly doing style="font-size: #ofpx;". However, I was wondering if there's a way to do it with scss so that, when I declare a class, it would also change the font size. For example:
<div class='col-lg-4 font-20'>whatever here</div>
and this would change my font-size to 20. If I did font-30, it would change my font-size to 30 and etc...
What I have so far:
.font-#{$fontsize} {
font-size: $fontsize;
}
This can't be done for arbitrary sizes. The nature of SCSS is that is needs to be flattened down to CSS before it gets applied to the HTML. What you are asking for, however, is essentially to create rules at run-time rather than compile-time.
In other words, SCSS makes it easier to write some of the repetitive parts of CSS, but it doesn't allow you to do anything new that wasn't already possible with plain old CSS.
What you're asking for is also a code smell. It smells like your markup isn't semantic enough. The purpose of a CSS class is to group objects with similar characteristics, but you're using them instead to describe the styles they impart. I would suggest stepping back and reconsidering what it is that you really want.
You obviously have details of certain elements that are context-dependent. For example, maybe you are applying these rules to buttons when you want to make them smaller or larger than usual. You need to identify the scenarios in which the buttons change. Maybe they are 20% smaller if they are in a modal dialog? Then write your normal .button rules, and also create rules for .modal .button which make it smaller.
If you're positive that you want to define font-size for each element within the HTML (and sometimes there are good reasons for doing so), just continue using inline styles. The only reason inline styling is frowned upon is because it combines model and view logic in a way that harms reusability; however, what you are requesting does so in exactly the same way. This is what inline styles were made for. Don't re-invent the wheel.
With all of that said, you can use sass loops to automatically generate classes for integers within a range. For example:
/* warning: this is generally a bad idea */
#for $i from 1 through 100 {
.font-#{$i} {
font-size: #{$i}px;
}
}
This is not a good idea. Pragmatically speaking it doesn't offer any advantages over just using inline styles and with large ranges your resulting file will be larger (which affects website load times).
Aside: There is a CSS philosophy (or fad, if you're feeling ungenerous) called Atomic CSS (or sometimes Functional CSS) which defies the classical advice given in this answer. I won't give an opinion on its effectiveness at producing clean, maintainable code, but it does typically require more tooling than SCSS alone if used with the degree of specificity requested in this question.
Just going to add, mixins are great, but if you want a util class (attach a class to an element, get that font-size applied to it, do a for-loop in SCSS like so..
#for $i from 1 through 4 {
$fontsize: 10px * $i;
.font-#{$i} {
font-size: $fontsize;
}
}
compiles to
.font-1 {
font-size: 10px;
}
.font-2 {
font-size: 20px;
}
.font-3 {
font-size: 30px;
}
.font-4 {
font-size: 40px;
}
If you want the class to match the # of pixels...
#for $i from 1 through 4 {
$base: 10;
$fontsize: $base * $i;
.font-#{$fontsize} {
font-size: $fontsize + 0px;
}
}
Which compiles to
.font-10 {
font-size: 10px;
}
.font-20 {
font-size: 20px;
}
.font-30 {
font-size: 30px;
}
.font-40 {
font-size: 40px;
}
Codepen example.
When using "words" instead of "numbers" for variables, and the word not being at the end of the classname. I could work something out using CSS Attribute selectors ("wildcard selector"). I can iterate over a map object, and use text values to build CSS selectors.
SASS
//map
$colors: (
primary: #121212,
success: #8bcea8
);
//loop
#each $color, $value in $colors {
//can't do this: div.first-class.is-style-#{$color}-component
//can do this:
div.first-class[class*="is-style-#{$color}-component"] {
background-color: $value;
}
}
HTML
<div class="first-class is-style-primary-component"></div>
This will generate a div.myComponent[class*="is-style-primary-component"] selector and so <div class="first-class is-style-primary-component"></div> (.first-class is not required, selector could be div[class*="is-style-#{$color}-component"] or even [class*="is-style-#{$color}-component"] only).
Yet, in some cases of CSS class naming, it could be limited due to the wildcard selector, which is "larger" than a specific class selector rule.
Of course, inline style tags are bad form. So yes, you should add some classes for font size, or just set font size on the elements you need to as you go. Up to you. If you want, you could use a mixin like so:
#mixin font-size($size) {
font-size: $size;
}
.some-div { #include font-size(10px); }
But that's probably overkill unless you get a group of rules that usually go together.
Just for those of you who might stumble across this question in a more recent time and are new to FrontEnd Development.
What Woodrow Barlow said about using inline-styles instead of rule specific classes isn't quite an up-to-date opinion. For instance, Bootstrap has some of those and Tachyons is entirely built upon them. Actually this practice is called Atomic CSS or Functional CSS.
It's better explained by John Polacek in his CSS Tricks article:
https://css-tricks.com/lets-define-exactly-atomic-css/
You can use mixins like this
#mixin font($fontsize) {
font-size: $fontsize;
}
.box {
#include font(10px);
}
One feature I really love with LESS is nested rules. It makes the stylesheet much cleaner that way and you can find an element very quickly.
I was wondering if there's an option when compiling to optimize selectors. For example...
#global {
/* Styles here maybe */
.container {
/* Styles here maybe */
#sidebar {
/* Styles here maybe */
.title {
font-weight: bold;
}
}
}
}
will be compiled to #global .container #sidebar .title { font-weight: bold; }.
But the first two selectors are useless, since #sidebar should be unique in my page.
Is there a way to ask LESS to compile this to #sidebar .title { font-weight: bold; } instead?
Your assumption is wrong that multiple IDs in CSS are redundant. Imagine, as an example, a site where the CMS generates the page type into the output, like that it's the contact page:
<body id="contact">
<section id="content">Blah</section>
</body>
According to your logic, the following piece of CSS would be a candidate for 'optimization':
#contact #content {
background:red;
}
Now however, your home page has <body id="home"> of course in this imaginary CMS. And suddenly the content of your homepage has a red background because you decided to erroneously optimize that #contact selector out of the CSS, while it most certainly shouldn't have a red background according to this rule.
So no, LESS cannot do this because it would break code. If you don't want the selectors, don't use them and don't put them in your code.
Other answers, including the accepted one, have explained convincingly why LESS cannot simplify your nested selectors in the way you want.
Actually, SASS has the ability to do this:
#global {
.container {
#at-root #sidebar {
.title {
font-weight: bold;
The #at-root directive essentially ignores all the higher nesting selectors. I don't know if LESS has something similar. The above compiles into simply
#sidebar {
.title {
font-weight: bold;
But there is a deeper issue here, starting with the fact that you "love" nested rules in LESS. Stop loving them quite so much. I don't know about you, but most people love nested rules because they think it's cool to exactly mimic the hierarchical structure of their HTML. The SASS docs even claim this as a benefit:
Sass will let you nest your CSS selectors in a way that follows the same visual hierarchy of your HTML.
So people with HTML such as
<div class="foo">
<ul>
<li class="item">
write LESS like
.foo {
ul {
li.item {
This is a horrible, horrible idea, It makes the structure of CSS completely dependent on the structure of the HTML. If you change one nesting level in the HTML, your CSS breaks. Often this approach is combined with a lot of rules defined against tag names such as ul instead of class names, which aggravates the dependency, so changing the ul to ol in the HTML breaks the rules again. Or it's combined with rules based on Bootstrap classes such as col-md-6, so if you ever change that to col-md-4 things break again.
CSS rules should be orthogonal to the HTML. They represent a different dimension. They represent styling concepts which are applied selectively throughout and across the HTML.
I am guessing that you wrote
#global {
.container {
#sidebar {
.title {
font-weight: bold;
because you are adopting this mistaken idea of mirroring the HTML structure in your LESS. Then, you notice that this compiles down to having selectors which contain multiple IDs, which you imagine must be inefficient (although, actually, the degree of inefficiency is minimal). You yourself are writing extraneous nesting levels in your LESS, then complaining that they may be slowing down performance!
Worse, you've hard-wired assumptions about the HTML structure into your CSS. It's of no consequence that the sidebar happens to fall inside a .container which is inside a global element. So don't write them. Perhaps at some point you decide to change the container class to container-fluid. Boom, instantly your CSS breaks. What is the point of conditionalizing the fact that the title should be bold on it being contained with a container class, which in any case is a layout-related class that has (or should have) nothing to do with styling? If you're going to duplicate your HTML structure in your CSS using preprocessor nesting, just go back to writing inline styles. At least that way you'll only have one file to change when you change your HTML around.
When designing CSS, you should think just as hard about the design of the rules as you do about the design of classes and methods when writing JS. In this case, you need to ask yourself, "What characterizes the situation where I want some title to be bold? What drives that? What is the nature of boldness? What am I indicating by boldness? What is the semantic notion indicated by boldness?"
Let's say that you want all titles to be bold. Then you simply say that:
.title { font-weight: bold }
Let's say that you want a title to be bold only when it's in the sidebar. Then you simply say that:
#sidebar .title { font-weight: bold; }
My suggestion here is to go cold turkey. Stop using nesting during a withdrawal period. Write rules with the minimum number of selector components. Refactor your classes to have semantic names (such as title-emphasis). Once you're "sober", you can go back to cautiously using LESS's nesting capability when it is useful, such as perhaps for hover:
#boo {
color: red;
&:hover {
color: blue;
}
}
This is actually useful and saves you from writing #boo twice, and groups the rules in an easy-to-understand way.
I hope this question isn't too weird and arbitrary. When I'm viewing some CSS using Firebug, I've noticed that the CSS properties for each tag are in alphabetical order.
Is it trying to tell us something?
Apart from the obvious benefit of being able to find the property you're after more quickly, I was wondering this: Is it quicker for a browser to apply the properties if they are in alphabetical order in the original stylesheet?
For example is this...
body {
background: #222;
color: #DDD;
font-size: 0.85em;
}
#content {
background: #444;
padding: 1em;
}
p {
border-bottom: 0.9em;
line-height: 1.2em;
text-align: justify;
}
...better than this...?
body {
font-size: 0.85em;
background: #222;
color: #DDD;
}
#content {
padding: 1em;
background: #444;
}
p {
text-align: justify;
line-height: 1.2em;
border-bottom: 0.9em;
}
Can this be tested effectively?
This would obviously be replicated throughout the entire stylesheet so would a browser benefit from doing things in order and, if so, would it be worth revisiting past stylesheets to reorder things?
-- edit --
Ok, a slight alteration to my question: What if the attributes are always in the same order for each tag. Background always before border always before color etc and so on (I know I've missed some!) for each and every tag. Alphabetical would aid you in keeping things in order rather than being the optimal method.
Looks like the overwhelming consensus is that it matters not, however!
There's definitely no speed benefit in ordering your styles alphabetically.
If you want real speed benefits, you should minify your CSS.
There are so many programs to do that, but here's one of them: CSSTidy. This program also has the option to put your styles in alphabetical order (if you want that for your benefit).
I don't think order of statements affects speed in any way, however, the efficiency of the statements can affect performance. (Slightly tangential, I guess...)
See: http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/docs/rendering.html#UseEfficientCSSSelectors
The performance benefit is for visual parsing only - FireBug will re-arrange your style attributes into alphabetical order when you inspect an element, which I find much quicker to locate a style attribute.
Firebug do it so that developers can search for an attribute value easily, and if you want speed benefit, write your css judiciously, which includes mainly avoiding repetition and redundancy and being DRY
Also when a page loads and CSS is parsed and layout is rendered once, next time its not done again, so stay calm, and try to make it more maintainable instead
Writing CSS in an alphabetical order just makes one thing easy: finding your attribute. It has nothing to do with speed.
To Increase speed, you can use shorthands rather than using separate attributes. Things like border-color, border-width, border-style can be used in a single attribute called border.
I'm not sure what to call this, but basically let's say I have a style that I use a lot,
.somepattern{
font-size:16px;
font-weight:bold;
border:2px solid red;
}
but sometime I want to change the font-size and the color for border. Is it possible to treat this code as a library, where I can set the style to a div
<div class="somepattern">Text</div>
but still control the 16px and red like we do with functions?
I know I'm late to the party but the selected answer IS NOT the right answer since it's deferring it to CSS preprocessors.
To answer the specific question "Do CSS functions exist?", the answer is: Yes.
However, CSS functions work completely different than the OP's concept initially is.
cuixiping's answer seems the most correct answer.
Examples of CSS functions are:
url()
attr()
calc()
rotate()
scale()
linear-gradient()
sepia()
grayscale()
translate()
A detailed, comprehensive list can be found here:
CSS functions on MDN Updated link 18/9/20
You can't programatically control CSS from your markup, but you can use one of the many CSS extensions to make CSS work more like a compiled language.
http://lesscss.org/
http://sass-lang.com/
If we wrote your example in LESS, we'd get something like this:
.somepattern(#color: red, #size: 16px) {
font-size:#size;
font-weight:bold;
border:2px solid #color;
}
And then you could use it in your LESS file like so:
.myclass {
.somepattern(green, 20px);
}
Nope. No CSS functionality like you require. At least not directly.
But there are at least two rather generic ways for you to use to accomplish what you need:
Class combining
You can of course combine as many classes as you like in any element like:
<div class="heading run-in">
Some heading
</div>
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...
and you'd have CSS defined as:
.heading {
color: #999;
font-size: 16pt;
font-weight: bold;
border-bottom: 2px solid red;
display: block;
margin: 1.5em 0 .5em;
}
.run-in {
display: inline;
margin: 0;
font-size: 1em;
}
LESS CSS
And there is of course LESS CSS project that lets you define variables (and has other sugars as well) and use them in other classes.
LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the client-side (IE 6+, Webkit, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js.
If your server platform is .net there's a project DotLessCSS with a library in .net as well. And there's also T4 template by Phil Haack.
Mind that there are many CSS preprocessors/enhancers like LESS CSS as well:
SASS
xCSS
HSS
CleverCSS
And probably some others that I didn't mention. Some support nesting CSS3 selectors as well others don't. Some are aimed at particular server-side technology some don't. So choose wisely.
you can redefine style by adding the style tag to your HTML:
<div class="somepattern" style="font-size:5px">Text</div>
or by applying multiple classes like class="somepattern small".
HTML
<div class="somepattern small"> Text </div>
CSS
.small {
font-size:5px;
}
the small class will be applied after the somepattern class and will therefore override any properties set in the some pattern class.
Even later to the party!
You can now do this with css custom variables.
In our css using the var() function:
.some-pattern {
font-size: var(--font-size);
font-weight: bold;
border: var(--border);
}
Then in our html defining the custom variables inline:
<div
class="some-pattern"
style="--border: 3px double red; --font-size: 16px;"
>
test
</div>
What you described is actually done with style attribute.
<div class="somepattern" style="font-size:10px;">Text</div>
I think this is exactly what you want. And it is not recommended, because it breaks the usual (good) pattern of spitting content and its visual style. (Although, honestly, I do use it a lot. ;-))
its a css class. It cannot be used like functions if that's what you are asking. There is no code library as its not a compiled. CSS is just presentation semantics (formatting) of a document written in a markup language. You can include all css classes in a .css file and use it where ever you want instead.
I've come to realize through the comments of others that this solution overcomplicates the problem at hand. This solution works but there are easier and better alternatives that do not depend on server-side scripting.
You can actually control your stylesheet if you make it a php file stylesheet.php?fontsize=16 and then inside your stylesheet you can retrieve the variable
<?php
header("Content-type: text/css");
$fontsize=16;
?>
.somepattern{
font-size: $fontsize;
font-weight:bold;
border:2px solid red;
}
Yes, it's possible. But you have to make it on your own with the help of Recatjs(u don't have to go deeper, basic is enough for this). Actually, think like that If bootstrap can make such things where we just have to define the class name and it automatically designes HTML files, then why we cannot do it.
Here's the image of my code(https://i.stack.imgur.com/hyePO.png)
and this is how I used it in my jsx code (https://i.stack.imgur.com/yK6VD.jpg)
Do you mean inline styles ? <div class="somepattern" style="border-color:green">Text</div>