Question

So far, my experience in web design has been with very small scale sites and blogs (where there isn’t much diversity in page styling). However, I am now beginning to tackle some significantly larger scale web sites and I want to start off on the right foot by creating a scalable and maintainable css file / structure.

Currently, my method for applying styles to web pages is to give every web page a distinct ID in the body, and then when I’m designing a page my css rule will look like this:

body#news section .top { rules }

Surely there is a more maintainable approach to applying CSS for a large-scale web site?

Answer 1

Avoid giving each page a body tag with a unique ID. Why? Because if a page needs to be styled uniquely, it should have its own stylesheet.

I will often have a main.css stylesheet, stylesheets for various similar portions of my website (like an administration.css for an admin section, assuming the pages in the admin section shared a similar look and feel), and then give certain unique pages their own stylesheets (like signup.css).

I then include the stylesheets in order from least-to-most specific, because if two otherwise-identical rules are encountered, the rule in the most “recently” included stylesheet will be used.

For example, if my main.css had:

a { color: red; }

… and for some reason, I wanted my signup page to have blue links:

a { color: blue; }

The second rule will overwrite the first if my signup.css were included after main.css.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="/stylesheets/main.css">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/stylesheets/signup.css">