Designers should not use IDs when writing HTML/CSS (right?)
I just had a little chat with Zatch Sharpie about how designers should write HTML/CSS.
It’s my contention that designers should never use IDs. Ever. Classes are for designers to style things. IDs are for developers who are writing JS to interact with specific elements. Zatch had never heard this opinion before. In fact he had heard the contrary and retorted with the classic “IDs are for things you use once, classes are for things you use multiple times.”
A good example is the footer or body element. There should never be more than one of these on a page. Ok, fine. But I have to ask: what is the downside to using a class to style it anyway?
There is literally no downside to a designer using classes for all styling, but the flip side is not true. If a designer uses an ID to style a #email-container wrapper, and then all of the sudden we want to display more than one #email-container we have to go back and fix not only the #email-container style but any styles that descend from it.
I really don’t want to get into a flamewar here, but I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on this. The only opinions I can find online against using classes for everything is that doing so is “sloppy.” I don’t see how. Sounds like religion to me.
Let me know what you think!
normalize.css: A neat take on CSS resets
Upon further review, you kinda wonder why this was never the way reset.css was built to begin with
Square's Card Case
I find myself mesmerized by the design of this landing page. Done very well.
To be great, you must understand the competition
I was listening to Morning Edition on the way to work a couple days ago, and something caught my ear. One of the reporters was talking about the recent problems that Toyota has been having. The president of Toyota, Akio Toyota, was seemingly absent from the response until he was cornered at the WEF. What he said wasn’t that big of a deal. But something the reporter harped on struck a chord with me.
Apparently, after giving a curt response, he hopped in an Audi and drove away. The reporter and people interviewed for this story made a big deal of this. OMFG, the president of Toyota isn’t driving a Toyota?!?!?! First of all, the WEF is in Davos, and I doubt the president of Toyota has is cars flown in when he visits foreign countries. But even if he owned the car, who cares?
It reminded me that to build a great product, you need to understand your competitors. And I can tell you that if I were the president of a car company, I would make sure to drive competitors products all the time. Luckily, I dont have to drop $30k to test out our competitors. I set aside 30 minutes a week to use our competitors products, just so I know ‘what is market’ with respect to other online invitation and party planning sites.
So just keep that in mind: if you are in a market where you can use your competitors products, take advantage. Use them. Learn from their successes and mistakes, and build something better.
You are not average -- great SEO article
While developing software or looking at new specs, I constantly have to fight my “distorted lens of familiarity” as Peter puts it. Great article.
