Pragmatic, practical font sizing in CSS

aniketpant · on March 1, 2012

I wonder why people don't discuss posts on CSS but I am surely going to.

I am totally in for the alpha notations as I feel more comfortable with it. Plus its semantic.

csswizardry · on March 1, 2012

Classes are neither semantic or insemantic, merely sensible or insensible.

Realising that classes aren't subject to the same semantics as elements is a massive breakthrough for a front-end developer to make IMO.

These classes aren't 'semantic' because no classes are; semantics in the front-end development sense is when something (i.e. a machine) can glean meaning from something. No machines (browsers, search bots, assistive technologies etc) actually interpret classes, they merely match them. The only thing that gleans meaning from a class is a human, so you should write classes for people.

Thus, in a roundabout way, no classes are semantic, so we need to stop worrying about that.

Cheers for the comment!

aniketpant · on March 1, 2012

You are very correct when you say that but I have been opposed a lot of times for trying to use classes like .small, .medium and .big for font sizes.

I understand that they take the meaning away from standard elements but I feel that classes give more meaning to an element.

p.small and p.big are all the way more logical than styling them according to the container that encloses them.

csswizardry · on March 2, 2012

> but I feel that classes give more meaning to an element

But they don't. Classes (and IDs) have nothing at all to do with semantics or meaning.

You can use whichever notation you wish (.big, .small, .alpha, .giga etc), I state as much at the end of the article, just remember that classes do not add meaning to (or subtract meaning from) an element :)

H

aniketpant · on March 2, 2012

So classes mean only one thing to us. They are used "just for styling". We use them only for our convenience and that's it.

Pretty cool then :)