
Pantsuit: The Hillary Clinton UI Pattern Library - rimunroe
https://medium.com/git-out-the-vote/pantsuit-the-hillary-clinton-ui-pattern-library-238e9bf06b54
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Leszek
When I saw the title, I assumed this was satirical. By the time I reached the
end, I became entirely uncertain. Is this a genuine post that happens to be a
bit amusingly self-aware, or full-blown Poe's law satire?

~~~
WorldMaker
Seems to be genuine and amusingly self-aware. Specifically see the animated
gif towards the top referring to decision to use the name "Pantsuit" for the
framework.

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ng12
I don't get it. They used CSS with some naming conventions -- what's
interesting about this? There's not even a link to code.

~~~
Liron
Read the title of the post - it's about their UI pattern library.

Her UI components look good, plus the tech choices she made around HTML+CSS
may be valuable to copy for anyone doing a high-accessibility content-oriented
site.

~~~
ng12
As a professional web developer this article was free of any useful insights
-- if there's something interesting about Pantsuit I'm failing to see it.

It might help if they put some stuff on GitHub, but as it stands this is
article seems to be just PR.

~~~
Liron
I'm a professional web developer too. Sure code would be nice, but I learned
these lessons: (1) kss-node exists and looks like a great documentation tool,
(2) campaigns need to design around accessibility which means they care extra
about making their rendered HTML+CSS semantic, (3) an input form is a good
example of something that you can skin with different stylesheets without too
much headache.

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cjslep
I had a horrifying flashback to millions of lines of Hungarian Notation in
Fortran and C++ when she described the prefixing for CSS classes.

I'm not a frontend developer, but is that really a good practice?

~~~
adamlett
The reason Hungarian Notation is considered bad practice is that it encodes in
a variable name what is already, or at least ought to be, encoded in the
variable’s type.

CSS is not really a programming language, and it doesn't really have types.

~~~
filoeleven
This is a bit offtopic but perhaps interesting: Joel Spolsky wrote an article,
Making Wrong Code Look Wrong[0], which includes a defense of the original
Hungarian notation--called Apps Hungarian--that I find rather convincing.

Essentially, the original intent was not to encode the _type_ in the variable
name, but the _kind_. One example given is from the Excel codebase, where ints
are used for tracking both rows and columns, but it doesn't make sense to
assign values between them (save for rare circumstances like transposition).
This is made explicit by prefixing rows with "rw" and columns with "col". If
you ever saw something like "rwMax = colCurrent" it sticks out immediately as
being wrong since you know that those two kinds of variables shouldn't mix.
The assignment is legal and the compiler won't help you; the semantic naming
scheme will.

Encoding the _type_ , like "ul" prefix for "unsigned long", is of course awful
and unnecessary and deserves all the derision it has gotten over the years.

[0][http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html)

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jbob2000
There's nothing in this article. Name spacing CSS? Ok... thanks? Feels like an
attempt at the Hillary camp to reach out to the developer voters.

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irunbackwards
All I got from this is Hillary needs Trump(s).

