Let’s say you need six different 100px square boxes with different characteristics:
- Red with Border
- Blue with Border
- Green with Border
- Red without Border
- Blue without Border
- Green without Border
You COULD create a unique class for each of these, like so:
.redwithborder {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
margin: 10px;
float: left;
background-color: red;
border: 3px solid black;
}
.bluewithborder {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
margin: 10px;
float: left;
background-color: blue;
border: 3px solid black;
}
...etc
BUT that’s called CSS Bloat because it includes a bunch of unnecessary repetitive code. Instead, create just five classes with simple, identifiable names that each handle something very specific:
.box {
width: 100px;
height: 100px;
margin: 10px;
float: left;
}
.red {
background-color: red;
}
.blue {
background-color: blue;
}
.green {
background-color: green;
}
.border {
border: 3px solid black;
}
In your HTML, things look just as clean, just put a space between each of the classes you wish to apply to the div:
<div class="red border box">
</div>
<div class="blue border box">
</div>
<div class="green border box">
</div>
<div class="red box">
</div>
<div class="blue box">
</div>
<div class="green box">
</div>
This method allows better future flexibility as well. If you wanted to create an orange box, or even a box with a background-image or some completely separate characteristic, you could. And then adding a border to that new box is simple adding a space and the “border” class name.
Does really IE6 or below support multiple classes? I’m not sure of it. Anyone could answer?
IE 6 does support multiple classes. Ryan Brill has a good explanation of it.
Basically, if you want to declare in your CSS #div.box.featured {
# background-color: #f5fbea;} IE 6 would not understand “box” and would apply the style to any div with the class “featured” not just divs with the class “box” and “featured”. Somewhat of a limitation but really no big deal.
Does not ie6 allow classes and ids though??
If so you could do red, green etc as a id (if only used once)
IE6 does support both classes and IDs. That is a good idea to separate them like that. Personally I would reserve ID’s for very unique things that you know you are only going to use once on a page, like a footer, for example.
This is perhaps the best css article I’ve read! Doing things this way really makes the code clearer and more reusable.
One question, how does the order of the classes affect the outcome, if at all?
For example, could
be different than say<div class="class_a class_b" >
<div class="class_b class_a">
Thx!