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by dspillett 1064 days ago
Perhaps because that would be wasteful if what you want to select already has a class that identifies all the elements you want and only the elements you want? Adding an extra class for your JS might mean adding it in several places around your work too, not just in a single template. Why define .things-to-select-when-I-look-for-red-things when .red-things already exists and could do the job?

There is also the matter of separation of concerns, not wanting to add classes specifically for particular bits of code where possible to avoid it, but given the sea of classes generated by frameworks these days I'm not sure that is an ideal which is much followed ATM.
1 comments
CSSer 1063 days ago
It’s a fair thought, and it’s interesting you mention that. I do think of it as separating concerns. I think of CSS for styles and JS for dynamism that can’t be achieved out of the box. Classes are only attributes, after all. Hypothetically, if you remove the JS-dependent class it doesn’t break any styles (unless of course, you’re using JS to apply styles, which is another conversation). That being said, if someone still felt strongly I’d concede this is subjective and only relevant to developer experience.

I think you touched on an objective subject, however, if you were alluding to performance. Classes are generally free and cheap. I’d be very interested in evidence to the contrary if anyone could share.

My last, somewhat random, thought is that it does indeed seem that who likes TW and who doesn’t does seem to depend a lot on the stack they’re thinking of when they mull over its (de)merits.

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dspillett 1063 days ago
> if you were alluding to performance

It isn't as much about performance (the small amount of extra network transfer is likely to be brought close to zero if compression is used, the extra CPU load might be measurable on low-spec devices but on top of all the junk already in sites using heavy frameworks this is not going to make/break anything) as maintainability. You have something extra to make sure is set everywhere it needs to be.

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