Or you can just just ".special-component .button" selector adapting the selector to be more specific as needed. Most code reuse in CSS is bad, because they break when the design changes. You don't DRY just because the code are the same.
yeah and when you do that for 100s of components i'd rather just see a utility class on the button itself vs hunting down its meaning in the related section of the component.
this is exactly the shit i was annoyed by when scaling, having to scope a .my-component-X section for literally every component and then grokking it later. you're basically taking the worst part of CSS (hunting down the meaning of a selector) and duplicating it for every component.
now maybe you say name it better or more semantically? congrats you recreated BEM lol. literally all the arguments used against it are purists for purity sake or thinking people haven't gone through this same thought exercise.
just use whatever is best for the task. i still use css the "traditional" way.
Why the hyperbolic about 100s of components? Because if that exists somewhere, then it's just plain bad design to me.
Let's say you writing templates for a website and you have a partial named "main-navbar", it has a search input field that looks like the other input, but needs some alteration. Are you going to name all these alteration like "margin-x-2px", "font-small". Or just add a new style block with ".main-navbar .search-input" as the selector.
> you're basically taking the worst part of CSS (hunting down the meaning of a selector) and duplicating it for every component.
Why are you hunting it down? If I need to find the styles that are applied to an element, I just open the web inspector. More often than not, from bottom to top, it's the reset style, the component style, the variant style, and the styles derived from its relation with its parent and siblings.
I would add, that usually also I would not hunt things down, because I put styling for a navigation into a stylesheet file called "navigation.css". Not much hunting to do there. Sounds crazy, but actually works.
every page in our app is a "component" which could have many sub components, some reused. i think it's actually very common in large scale apps so maybe we're not even starting on the same foot.
would you not consider opening the web inspector "hunting down" when i can just understand the full thing just by looking at the element itself? to your example, let's say now you want to put your search bar next to another item, but that item requires that there be 4rem right margin. Then you put your search bar next to another item in another component that requires 8rem top margin. this starts breaking down at scale. in the past we would just inline the margin value. eventually this moved to basic utility classes which evolved into tailwind.
and with your code, you've just proved my point. i find tailwind overly verbose (necessary evil), but honestly i don't even need to open the "inspector" to understand how this will look. you can give me that 12 months from now and i can understand exactly what it is in 10 seconds. with "alert" i have to referencing something else. and this is just a handful of lines, imagine if your component is larger than that. it's also a bad example because i will just eventually roll the styles for "alert" into its own class if it makes sense. get the best of both worlds.
again, i challenge you to just consider that a lot of other people as smart as you have thought through these issues and made the according trade-offs. the example you're giving is just way too simplistic and pretty much like every example someone gives in these threads.
