Object Oriented CSS: Catchy Buzz-phrase or Legitimate Design Approach?
I think the buzzwordiness of calling it "Object-oriented CSS" is actually detracting from its usefulness and the wider adoption of the concept.
When I read up on it, I think the claim that it was OO actually slowed my understanding of what it really was.
People who know what "object-oriented" means in programming will be skeptical, because it's not really OO, is it? It's just an attempt to apply some OO principles to CSS to improve its efficiency. And on the other side, most client-side developers will not understand the concept at all if they're not programmers, and so they'll just be baffled or embarrassed.
So, great concept, needs rebranding. Maximum CSS! Power CSS! CSS Reborn! CSS Squared! CSS Prime! Something like that.
Catchy buzz-phrase AND legitimate design approach.
Though I think some of the ideas there are a bit naive in that they tend to forget the "client changes eveything as it goes" web development paradigm.
I've been saying this for years.
CSS selectors are based on instance IDs and classes. It even supports multiple inheritance. How much more obvious could that be?
The beauty of thinking of CSS in object terms is that it becomes very straightforward to start "casting" your mark-up elements. Need that div to suddenly become INotRenderedAnymore? Just let JS extend it's class attribute to match .removed, don't mess around with style properties.
Obviously that's a fairly trite example, but the benefits should be clear - especially in the context of JS manipulation. You can decouple the JS from the actual styles it has to modify, which is both a maintenance and abstraction bonus, but also has fringe benefits like not setting very high-specificity styles directly (which CSS cannot override).
I would say it's more of a catchy buzz-phrase for something already present in CSS. Of course, before we start talking about what is OO and what is not and how CSS is object-oriented, we would have to define what it actually is - which is something others have struggled with before and is subject to heated debates. But if we assume that the basic principles of OO are:
- Class
- Object
- Instance
- Method
- Message passing
- Inheritance
- Abstraction
- Encapsulation
- Polymorphism
- Decoupling
we can say, that Cascading Style Sheets are somewhat object-oriented, because they allow classes to be defined, instances/objects created (by assigning a class to an element), inheritance of classes (even multiple inheritance), abstraction (e.g. by defining styles for the plain elements) and polymorphism (by defining the same class name for different elements). Of course methods/message passing is not possible, because of the static nature of CSS.
So in general I would say its a valid approach to develop CSS in an object-oriented manner, but I would not really call it Object Oriented CSS, because at least to me, it is something deeply inherent to CSS. It would be somewhat like saying "I am doing Object Oriented Java..."