Writing CSS: How We Got to Where We Are Today

If we zoom out and reflect on how writing CSS has evolved over the years, it is interesting to see how things have changed. That is exactly what we are going to do in this article by looking at the early days of writing CSS, reflecting on the more prominent concepts and strategies that have been used over the years, and evaluating the best practices that we use today.

Introduction

There is no shortage of opinions and ideas for how to write CSS. We’ve seen everything from the earliest practices of organizing a stylesheet by sectioning it with comments to breaking it up into Sass partials, all the way to more formalized strategies like BEM, SMACSS, ITCSS, and a bunch of other fancy acronyms. But we still never seem to get close to landing on any sort of “consensus” for how to do it, not that we need one.

There’s no “right” way to write CSS — that’s one of the greatest, but also most frustrating, things about it. In some ways, CSS is begging for structure. Yet, it also tends to revolt if we make it too rigid.

But if we zoom out and reflect on how writing CSS has evolved over the years, it is interesting to see not only how things have changed but how past ideas have influenced the methods, best practices, and even the latest features that we use to write CSS today.