Tag: coding

Can haz layout

Jeroen

Contains IE Hack This weekend I decided to deep dive in a StackOverflow question on the combination of pseudo-elements and the IE8 (and lower) filters. Even though it seemed to me the question couldn’t be answered with 100% certainty, I still gave it a shot. A similar but better answer got accepted (damn you, “ScottS”!!), but that’s besides the point. The most important thing I learned from answering this question, is understanding the magic in IE (especially version 8 and below). So, for reference, here are the important links of articles that made me understand IE a bit better:

The kicker from all this research is that I now finally understand this remotely related line of CSS I’ve seen (and even used) a lot:

This is a CSS hack to get some versions of IE to behave nicely. So far, nothing new. However, after reading the above articles, I finally understand what it does: it  forces the hidden IE property hasLayout to true. And that’s useful for quite a few cases where you’d expect things to have layout, but when they don’t by default.

Hack or not, I’m glad I understand things a wee bit more now.

CSS syntax naming conventions

Jeroen 2 Comments

My next Stack Exchange Challenge post will most likely be about the Programmers SE. One part of the challenge is to actually ask a question I have on the topic. The question I came up with (to be honest, this has been bothering me for months now) took quite some time to write down carefully. So, as I don’t have my next SE Challenge post ready yet, I decided to cross-post my question here on my blog as well.

The Question: what are the practical considerations for the syntax in class and id values?

Note that I’m not asking about the semantics, i.e. the actual words that are being used, as for example described in this blogpost. There are a lot of resources on that side of naming conventions already, in fact obscuring my search for practical information on the various syntactical bits: casing, use of interpunction (specifically the - dash), specific characters to use or avoid, etc.

To sum up the reasons I’m asking this question:

  • The naming restrictions on id and class don’t naturally lead to any conventions
  • The abundance of resources on the semantic side of naming conventions obscure searches on the syntactic considerations
  • I couldn’t find any authorative source on this
  • There wasn’t any question on SE Programmers yet on this topic

Some of the conventions I’ve considered using:

CSS naming conventions
CSS naming conventions
  1. UpperCamelCase, mainly as a cross-over habit from server side coding
  2. lowerCamelCase, for consistency with JavaScript naming conventions
  3. css-style-classes, which is consistent with naming of css properties (but can be annoying when Ctrl+Shift+ArrowKey selection of text)
  4. with_under_scores, which I personally haven’t seen used much
  5. alllowercase, simple to remember but can be hard to read for longer names
  6. UPPERCASEFTW, as a great way to annoy your fellow programmers (perhaps combined with option 4 for readability)

And probably I’ve left out some important options or combinations as well. So: what considerations are there for naming conventions, and to which convention do they lead?