For those who don’t know of the concept, OOCSS stands for Object Oriented CSS — @stubornella can explain it better than me on the GitHub repo: https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/wiki

I had previously considered this sort of approach to only be suitable for prototyping frameworks, such as Zurb Foundation. I was originally hesitant of the presentation naming of the classes (I was never a fan of presentational grids to begin with) but I have understood that this approach is much easier to understand when multiple people are working on a project, without any documentation.

The idea of potentially using multiple classes for each element struck me as bloating the file, but it makes sense.

So, my concerns:

Grids. Name them how you like: “.size2of3, .col1″ but they work. If it were using those, or using “#primary” I know which I’d go with now.

The idea in the past has been that we could restyle #primary and change the width, padding, everything. But when has that happened? Restyling a website with JUST CSS?

I like presentation grids now.

The next thing, whether to go presentational on anything else? Colours, sizes? In some previous projects I used classes like “.orange”. This I feel is wrong. I now define primary, secondary and tertiary colours. Not only does this keep a sense of order through the whole project, but if you change the brand, the colours can change with no HTML amends (sounds a bit contradictory I know).

The next thing. Responsive. I’ve been a massive advocate of responsive, but the issue I have with presentational grids is that they no longer make sense when you want to change the view.

Some systems decide to revert to a 1 column approach. Whilst this might be OK for mobile, the tablet could be different. Zurb actually have phone class names that you can use. e.g. (“.size2of5 .phone1of1 .tablet1of2″) but that seems to require a lot of extra thinking, and extra bloat that is unnecessary.

I’m still thinking about this one. It also doesn’t cater for the ‘mobile first’ approach.

So, there are lots of things to think about, but I do feel like it is the way to go.

Want to know more. Well, follow @csswizardry and @stubornella and check out the following pages:

• https://github.com/stubbornella/oocss/wiki
• http://vimeo.com/44773888
• http://oocss.org/

In this post I’m going to be talking about box styling – any CSS effects that can be implemented on all 4 sides of an element. This can include:

• padding
• margins
• borders

There are 4 different ways of ways of applying styles to the sides of an element. The most conventional is the longest version which styles the sides clockwise from top, right, bottom and left. You can remember this as TrouBLe. This method allows you to set a different style on all 4 sides.

element{padding: [top] [right] [bottom] [left]}

Using 3 figures allows you to style the top, with left and right at the same time, followed by the bottom. This is useful if you require the same size on the left and right, but a different size for top and bottom.

element{padding: [top] [left/right] [bottom]}

Styling both the top and bottom, and the left and right sides can be done using 2 figures. This can be used when the top and bottom sizes are the same and the left and right sizes are the same.

element{padding: [top/bottom] [left/right]}

The last possibility is where all sides have the same size declaration. This can be achieved by using just one value.

element{padding: [top/bottom/left/right]}

Bonus Tip

When using 0 as a value, it doesn’t matter whether it is a pixel, em or any other measure so whenever using 0, just declare it on its own.