OOCSS Philosophical Coherence

[Bill Burcham]

Andrew Vit mentioned the OOCSS stuff a few days ago. I'm involved in a
(verbose) thread over on that group that describes a marriage of that
design philosophy with that of Compass:

http://groups.google.com/group/object-oriented-css/browse_thread/thread/2a7276590fa10a97

It's largely academic at this point since there isn't actually much
OOCSS code in their Github repository beyond resets and grids.
Nevertheless, the OOCSS principles are compelling and it'd be really
cool if, when they actually get around to implementing/publishing
their reusable "blocks" and "content blocks" and skins, that those be
available in Compass.

[Chris Eppstein]

Thanks for the pointer. I think you make some good points. I need to read up more on OOCSS, but from what I've read in the past I found OOCSS to be largely orthogonal to the capabilities of Sass. Compass is just a port of libraries to Sass and some command line utilities to make working with Sass easier.

So far, I've focused on porting the layout frameworks but there's plenty of room under the Compass tent for OOCSS, jquery-ui, etc, that are targeted at styling just a portion of a page.

I agree with you that the requirement that OOCSS makes me use presentational class names is a deal breaker for me -- just like it was in blueprint. I don't want to tie my pages to a particular design -- it's just too inflexible.

If you go take a look at caring.com (I'm the architect there) you'll see some lots and lots of consistent styling (and some parts that are not ;-) that would make you think we're using something like OOCSS. But really they are just sass mixins with arguments.

I will take a closer look at the OOCSS workflow and see what support compass would need to add to enable a port of OOCSS to it.

chris