CSS Methodologies

CSS methodologies are naming and organization conventions that keep stylesheets maintainable as a project grows. They answer questions a framework leaves open: how to name classes, where styles for a component live, how to avoid specificity wars, and how a team shares a common vocabulary. This category covers five of the best known: BEM, OOCSS, SMACSS, Atomic CSS and CUBE CSS.

BEM names classes as block, element and modifier, which makes relationships obvious in the markup and keeps specificity flat. OOCSS separates structure from skin and container from content to encourage reuse. SMACSS sorts rules into categories such as base, layout, module, state and theme. Atomic CSS uses small single-purpose classes, the idea behind utility frameworks like Tailwind CSS.

CUBE CSS, short for Composition, Utility, Block, Exception, embraces the cascade instead of fighting it: global styles do most of the work, utilities handle repeated tweaks, and blocks only add what is specific to a component. Scoped styles in Vue, Svelte and CSS Modules solve some naming problems automatically, but a shared convention still helps with global styles and design tokens.