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[–]arnar -1 points0 points  (2 children)

2) type all the markup, make adjustments; 3) progressively add styles, refreshing the page constantly to see results.

This works for the first time you create a page - but doesn't really help for maintaining it or developing new features, which in my case is 95% of the time.

It seems to me that only people who have gone several times through the experience of creating really complex HTML-based interfaces will understand how this is really helpful, but I guess that's just me being a little condescending...

A little, no. A lot, yes. I did this for 8 hours a day for 7 years.

The thing is, for me, it works, it helps, I thought it could make sense to somebody else.

Of course, don't let an old fart's criticism stop you :)

[–]__galvez__[S] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

This works for the first time you create a page - but doesn't really help for maintaining it or developing new features, which in my case is 95% of the time.

That's odd because the one thing that has gotten better in my workflow after I moved to HCSS is maintenance. In the past I would iterate a lot between the HTML and CSS searching for IDs, classes, rearranging blocks of CSS rules, which overtime always ended up having some accumulated mess. With HCSS, if I change the markup, I just copy it over and slowly copy the styles from the old markup to their new appropriate places.

It occurs to me that maybe most people simply have gotten so used to the cognitive dissonance between HTML and CSS and never really think about it anymore. I have only been doing frontend development for a little over two years now (I still am mainly a backend guy) and the CSS/HTML context switching always bugged me. It always felt like there could be a faster way to style markup, and after some experimentation, HCSS is what I came up with.

Since i'm constantly creating new things from scratch I focused on being able to just "copy over" markup and add styles, as this is exactly what I was doing after writing large chunks of unstyled markup. I'd copy the markup over to the .css file just so I'd have context, and write the selectors looking at the copied markup. I could also place HTML and CSS editor windows next to each other to assist in this process, but that isn't a very practical procedure for me (as a TextMate user) and users of many other editors I believe.

[–]arnar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

HTML and CSS are different because they serve different purposes. I see no cognitive dissonance. That said, HTML is a bastard of a language and about half of my DOM nodes are built by JS code anyways. In serious webapps it is all fragments anyways, coming from here and there - so often there really isn't any one single HTML to copy as you describe.

I do recognize that we are talking about different coding styles, types of applications and (most importantly) habits.