How to document CSS for a large site [closed]

Question

We maintain a fairly large site with a lot pages. As the pages grew, so did the HTML and CSS. Is there any good way to document these? Like which page uses a particular selector, etc. What's the best practice for maintaining CSS for a large site?

Answer 1

In my experience, CSS is not maintainable. If CSS were a room in your house, it's the basement...it collects things over the years and after a while you tend to have more stuff in it that is of no use vs. stuff you want to keep.

As such, I recommend starting fresh every few years.

Barring that, some suggestions:

• Maintain the CSS dev-side in as many separate files as it makes sense to have. Use a minimizer to compress and combine it all into one file for deployment.
• look into OOCSS (Object Oriented CSS) methods. I try to use that these days for sites that have large teams of developers. The basic concept is to have more class names in your HTML, but what class names you have are much more re-usable across the entire site, so your CSS files should remain more streamlined.
• build component libraries. A major goal is to NOT have specific css for each individual page. Instead, leverage reusable code and design patterns across the site.