Comments on: Structural Naming

By: OpenOn website

OpenOn website — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 01:34:28 +0000

[...] am again standing on the shoulders of giant’s regarding the markup, and in particular and keen to adopt [...]

By: CSS: Estructura Vs Semántica . Como nombrar las diferentes partes de mi web | Timersys

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 13:36:38 +0000

[...] and HTML5 2. Standardizing CSS class and id names 3. User interfaces and CSS Naming convention 4. Structural naming 5. Smart CSS Ain”t Always Sexy CSS 6. Semantic coding 7. Semantic naming conventions for HTML and [...]

By: OpenOn website - davidgswain.com

OpenOn website - davidgswain.com — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 22:31:30 +0000

[...] am again standing on the shoulders of giant’s regarding the markup, and in particular and keen to adopt [...]

By: Theodicius » CSS and the meaning in presentation

Theodicius » CSS and the meaning in presentation — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 05:51:11 +0000

[...] was a time when I was fully in agreement with Eric Meyer on the naming of classes. It made sense to me to create CSS class names based on the structure of [...]

By: Structural Naming Convention in CSS - Six Revisions

Structural Naming Convention in CSS - Six Revisions — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:25:10 +0000

[...] Structural Naming [...]

By: deshock.com » Blog Archive » A WordPress Theme Structure with Meaning and Possibility

Mon, 05 May 2008 13:40:59 +0000

[...] thinking about the whole topic of naming and structure check out What’s in a name (pt2) and Structural Naming. These two posts are 4 years old but still [...]

By: Sean Brookes

Sean Brookes — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:02:17 +0000

Looking around the web, the question of naming conventions was kicked around for a while a couple of years back, but appears to have gone quiet.

Tony, I have spent the last few days researching for a large UI revamp project and you are right, there seemed to be a lively discussion around these issues that stopped around mid 2005. I too am going to investigate some of the new CSS frameworks, but wrt your "customer" naming idea, I think you are on to something. Combined with a body id tag that kind of convention could be quite powerful.

By: Holly Fortenberry

Holly Fortenberry — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:38:47 +0000

I (now) use standards-based (semantic) naming conventions for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is to save time (for automation) when creating a new site.

Also, nobody seems to have noticed/mentioned that “header” (and “footer” as well, although with less potential problem) implies a position on the page rather than content and is therefore not technically semantic. I can see where it might be advantageous to use the “header” along the left (or heck, even right) side or who knows where on a more artistic site.

I like to use “nameplate” instead of “header” since it semantically includes all the important ingredients name/logo/graphic/subtitle (see publishing naming conventions). I use “masthead” for supporting pages, such as those in a login screen or a form where you don’t want or need all of the parts of the nameplate. “Header” is absolutely no good in my opinion because it is presentational as well as too similar to the “head” tag. The use of “header” by a majority of websites tells me that there is still too little deep understanding/application of the web standards.

By: Tony Martin

Tony Martin — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 08:08:38 +0000

Looking around the web, the question of naming conventions was kicked around for a while a couple of years back, but appears to have gone quiet. Maybe css frameworks are the new hot topic.

However, as a keen user of Ruby on ~Rails, it seems to me that there is a strong case for revisiting css naming wrt RoR structure. I have been giving it a bit of thought recently and there is good scope to fairly tightly couple css names wtih for example the use of RoR elements such as partials and layouts. eg if my view contains a partial for customer, then it seems to make sense for it to be in a div with an id of customer.

Taking this further, I have played around with targetting elements using nested ids, so that my partial might have an id of customer, but it could appear in different views. So if I have a view, say sales which includes customer, should my sale be a div with an id of sales so that I can specifically target div#sales div#customer. This seems to fit with having a generic customer presentation, but allowing it to be easily adjusted depending in which view it is included.

I think it there is a great opportunity for some conventions to be developed for CSS with RoR.

By: Lorelle on WordPress » More Website Design Mistakes

Lorelle on WordPress » More Website Design Mistakes — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 23:04:11 +0000

[...] f and Nonsense’s “What’s in a Name? Part 1″ and Part 2, along with Eric Meyer’s Structural Naming, [...]

By: Max Design - standards based web design, development and training » Blog Archive » Some links for light reading (28/6/04)

Sun, 01 Jan 2006 20:26:22 +0000

[...] ome links for light reading (28/6/04)

June 28th, 2004
Fluid Shadows Structural Naming Integrated Web Design: Strategies for Long-Term CSS Hack M [...]

By: MikeD

MikeD — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 21:46:18 +0000

I thought the idea was to create clean html that is structurally sound to convey the content without depending on CSS (or javascript) and to keep the markup as free of extraneous clutter as possible. It seems wrong to denounce old-school ‘tag soup’ at the same time we’re creating attribute soup. (is it justifyable because we’re following a convention)?
If browser support would improve enough to allow CSS developers to fully utilize (existing & new) selectors, there really is no argument for dozens of reserved design/layout keywords. Of course creating clean markup is harder than it sounds, but the up-front effort is usually worthwhile when the content is later re-purposed through different media or to new consumers.

By: My mental mirror

My mental mirror — Mon, 04 Oct 2004 18:10:35 +0000

Is a developer an end user?
I recently found a discussion on structured naming conventions (continued on meyerweb.com.) The whole discussion was about how structure the names of elements should be put on a web page. One comment made by Johan Sand on And all that…

By: Brian Ewins

Brian Ewins — Thu, 12 Aug 2004 15:45:53 +0000

I know I’m a bit late on this thread, but got here from links in Thorsten Scherlers OSCOM04 proposal (http://www.oscom.org/events/oscom4/proposals/skins). I’m suprised no-one’s mentioned here, or on malarkey, that there’s at least one limited css naming convention, the one in the portlets specification: http://www.jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr168/

eg “portlet-section-header Table or section header”. Portlets have a need for some conventions as you’re embedding content from one webapp into another. This isn’t just a java thing – it originated in the WSRP TC:
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=wsrp
… I’m not sure how set in stone that all is, the WSRP lot appear to have dropped CSS from their spec in favour of contextual selectors.

By: Michael Romero

Michael Romero — Thu, 08 Jul 2004 23:43:06 +0000

i understand the basic idea that eric is trying to convey here, and i think he’s right to a point, but it risks being too rigid, if you ask me. the idea is good that things should match up, but maybe we need to think of a naming convention that makes sense to the project and the layout.