Velocity 2010: Nicole Sullivan, "The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS"
Why Stack Overflow recommends it
Stack Overflow users link it when answering questions about keeping CSS manageable, using many small reusable classes, and avoiding specificity and !important problems in large stylesheets.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2010 to 2012.
What it is
A 2010 Velocity conference talk by CSS consultant Nicole Sullivan on why large stylesheets become bloated and hard to maintain. She introduces Object-Oriented CSS, built around small reusable classes, and describes the gains Facebook saw from it in both CSS and HTML size.
What people said
Strong rec Chris Lewis · 2012-11 · Stack Overflow · on “How many classes added to an html element is too much?”
I would try to group some of those attributes into clases that describe boxes of certain sizes (i.e. a certain width, heght, padding, margin, font-size etc). One of the best tips I've seen recently is to only create small reusable classes which should look the same no matter where they are displayed on the page. i.e. a .blue-box class should look the same no matter where it appears - so don't do #content .blue-box as being different from #footer .blue-box The following video outlines some good practices to stop your CSS getting 'out of control': Velocity 2010: Nicole Sullivan, "The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS" [this video]
Recommends Useless Code · 2011-07 · Stack Overflow · on “Using classes extensively to reduce CSS size”
Sounds like you are wanting to try something similar to Object-Oriented CSS [LINK] . Nicole Sullivan thinks it's a good idea [this video] . Personally I'm not so sure about this approach but according to her speech Facebook implemented it and not only cut their CSS size but also their HTML size.
Recommends No Results Found · 2012-07 · Stack Overflow · on “Combining CSS files: per site or per page template?”
You're correct, it just gets loaded into cache. Same with scripts. Generic class names can be really powerful if used carefully and properly. This is one of the talks that helped me a lot with dealing with CSS explosion: [this video]
Cites Bryan Downing · 2010-08 · Stack Overflow · on “Grid CSS layouts. Tell me the reasons to not use”
I've just started using object oriented CSS ( OOCSS [LINK] ). I'm really enjoying it because it provides a very basic and minimalistic grid system. It allows you to create relative sized grids by dividing an element into halves, thirds, fourths, or fifths. The divided elements are infinitely nestable. OOCSS is more of a philosophy than a framework. It's all about how you extend a very basic foundation. Check out these links: [LINK] [LINK] [this video]
Cites Danger14 · 2012-05 · Stack Overflow · on “CSS Grids and Responsive Design”
Because she said to avoid !important unless it's a leaf node at Velocity conference [this video] , it's odd how she would put that in her code.