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Nir Benita
Courses Plus Student 3,905 PointsAre ID's deprecated?
I've been hearing a lot of major players in the front end community talking about dropping ID's and using only classes.
I'm now working on a major project with a friend and halfway through, finding I regert not using ID's for the sake of order and less lines of JS.
I wonder, what do you think?
2 Answers
James Barnett
39,199 PointsYou should certainly use IDs as hooks for JavaScript. The issue with IDs is using them as hooks for CSS.
TL;DR - Read this article about CSS specificity and use this specificity calculator if you think you might be in a specificity war.
So your goal should be to write a selector that is as specific as needed but no more. Think of CSS specificity as a precious resource you want to conserve until you need it.
If you run into a tricky specificity issue with a class you can easily override it the occasional ID
On the other hand, if you squander specificity with casual use of IDs for styling on just any 'ole element you can easily end up using !important and that's a bad idea because you can't override !important.
Nir Benita
Courses Plus Student 3,905 PointsI'll have to read it, sounds really interesting! Thanks James.