Learn Enough HTML, CSS and Layout to be Dangerous: An Introduction to Modern Website Creation and Templating Systems

Chapter 6

The Style of Style

We can think of CSS as operating at two main levels: the browser and the text editor. From the browser’s perspective, the exact choices for CSS classes and ids are irrelevant; indeed, as far as the browser is concerned, there is hardly any difference between beautiful self-contained CSS with perfectly comprehensible class names and horrible inline styles on every element.¹

1. There might be slight differences in download and processing times, but on most modern systems these differences would hardly be detectable to the user.

At the level of the text editor, though, these concerns matter a lot to the people writing the HTML and CSS for the site—in this case, us. The browser might not care much about the repetition ...