Developing CSS rules

Decide where to place the CSS rules for your application and then stay with that strategy. Mixing strategies during development may be expedient, but failing to clean up and standardize can lead to debugging issues down the road.

Of course, the main reason to use CSS to style design elements is the ease with which styles can be changed. CSS facilitates experimenting with different combinations of attributes to achieve different looks. Once you settle on a specific set of style attributes for a feature, then applying those same attributes to another design element amounts only to assigning the same CSS class name to that other design element.

Working with CSS can be quite satisfying, but also somewhat frustrating at times. CSS is a forgiving language; incorrectly specified rules are simply skipped. There are no error messages or other indicators of what is wrong. What you wanted was not what you got, and that's about it.

This section offers some suggestions that may reduce...