bem

Setting CSS variables to theme a design system can be tricky: if they are too scoped, the system will lose consistency. If they are too global, you lose granularity.

Maybe we can fix both issues. I’d like to try to boil design system variables down to two types: Global and Component variables. Global variables will give us consistency across components. Component variables will give us granularity and isolation. Let me show you how to do it by taking a fairly simple component as an example.

BEM (Block Element Modifier) is a popular CSS class naming convention that makes CSS easier to maintain. This article assumes that you are already familiar with the naming convention. If not you can learn more about it at getbem.com to catch up on the basics.

The standard syntax for BEM is:

block-name__element-name--modifier-name

I'm personally a massive fan of the methodology behind the naming convention. Separating your styles into small components is far easier to maintain than having a sea of high specificity spread all throughout your stylesheet. However, there are a few problems I have with the syntax that can cause issues in production as well as cause confusion for developers. I prefer to use a slightly tweaked version of the syntax instead. I call it ABEM (Atomic Block Element Modifier):

[a/m/o]-blockName__elementName -modifierName

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The following is a guest post by Jon Yablonski. Jon is going to show us an example of how we might approach markup such that one component is particularly versatile. It works as-is, and has a standardized way of making variations (adding a single class) that allow the design to be altered to fit the situation.

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