At the CSS Day conference held in June 2014, I introduc, with some trepidation, a bizarre three-character CSS selector. I nam it the “Lobotomiz Owl” because it somewhat resembles the expressionless stare of an owl, and it turn out to be the most popular part of my talk. See below.
I can’t tell whether the audience applaud
The thinking behind this invention, or nervously smil slightly at my audacity to include such a strange and seemingly useless concept. Perhaps I was unknowingly speaking to a hall full of enthusiastic owl protectors and owl shelter supporters. I just don’t know.
The entire lecture from CSS day in the original version
Said Lobotomiz Owl selector looks like this:
Despite the fact that the name is not respectable enough and the form respectable, for me the lobotomiz owl selector is no longer a mere mental construct. It is the result of relentless experiments conduct to automate the layout of floating content. The owl selector is an “axiomatic” selector with voracious competence. And because it is, many will be reluctant to use it, and some will even be horrifi that I am including it in sharp code.
However, I’m going to demonstrate how this selector can ruce code clutter with rundant or unus elements, spe up development, and help automate the styling of arbitrary, dynamic content.
Prescription styling
Professional web interface designers are almost universally accustom to styling HTML elements normatively, or prescriptively . We invent some interface object and create styles for it, which are manually enter into the markup as “hooks”.
End up with most often is a class selector, regardless. The fact that it only belongs in presentation, not semantic interoperability. Although the elements and most of the attributes are pretermin and standardiz, classes are agents that give. Us the freom of authorship. It’s the classes that give us control over things.
CSS frameworks are essentially libraries of non-standard, class-bas ciphers, with the intention of forming explicit relationships between styles and their elements. They are prais for their ability to help designers produce attractive interfaces quickly and criticiz for the inevitable accessibility shortcomings that result from starting with style (form) rather than content (function).
Whether you use a framework or your own methodology, prescriptive styling mode also prohibits spain phone number data unprofessional content itors. This is because it requires not only knowlge of presentational markup, but also access to such markup in order to encode the styles as prescrib. WYSIWYG itors and tools like Markdown inevitably lack such complexity, so such styling does not interfere with the itorial process.
Congestion
Regardless of whether you can create and maintain presentational markup, the question remains whether you should markup this way. When you add presentational ciphers to previously dense markup, you inevitably overwhelm it. And what for? Will it make it possible to ruce the overcrowding of the style prescription?
Choose to style exclusively with nam elements. We make the mistake of claiming that HTML google these changes, whether the elements live. A kind of vacuum, that they are neither subject. To inheritance nor generally the same. When we treat an element as if “this thing cg leads nes to be styl”, we tend to rundantly manually set some values for the element that should already.