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Comment by Loque | Hacker News Reader

I am really glad someone has put this together - I was enjoying Harry Roberts talk at RenderConf until he dropped this in our faces: http://csswizardry.com/2016/05/the-importance-of-important/

Utility classes I dislike (mixins plx) and the idea of using important with them is not a design decision I would want to pick up.

I guess my bigger problem is that Harry sells himself as an expert, stands up on stage telling people this is how they should be doing things... and here I am, no book, no stage and my specificity level gets trumped by Harry amongst certain members of my team (despite my years of qualified awesomeness across large scale, popular, public domain sites)

Thought I'd just share that with you :`P

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I read that post earlier and it seemed fine. If you add a .bold class to an element, why would you want it to sometimes not be bold?

Utility classes don't belong everywhere but I think it's going a bit far to discredit the man for proposing this. His work on ITCSS in particular shows he's well versed in the language. I find this system far more sane than other proposals.

> If you add a .bold class to an element, why would you want it to sometimes not be bold?

The problem is having a class called .bold, and then baking it into your HTML. I feel like many people arguing this have never undertaken a full-scale visual redesign on a large site. The designer comes in, and all the sudden everything marked .bold ends up meaning "lightweight italicized text". This presentational/semantic cycle repeats every 6 years or so, but I'm not sure where it's heading.

Why bother with class 'bold' when you could use inline styles? (I jest)

I come from an older thinking that your HTML should not have any classes that imply visual style, and that classes/id's should be semantic to the content and structure of the HTML.

CSSZen garden is a good example of this.

Nowadays I personally love semantic markup, stylistic mixins, and a CSS file linking the two together following BEM patterns.

I think legitimate times when this falls apart, is when I watch the designers I work with now, work in HTML & CSS - they need to quickly move things around, so doing this all from markup gives them a big speed increase, up until a point that is. We get involved now early after initial client direction sign-off to make their markup and CSS more robust before they carry on like a pig in poo.

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