Programming

How the Brady Bunch Can Help your CSS

    Alex Walker
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    The “C” in CSS — the “cascading” part — describes the way our styles can flow down from the high-level architecture in our documents, down to the smaller page elements. It hints at the normal direction that styles flow — downwards — but this isn’t the ONLY way styles can be routed to one page object via another.

    Sibling selectors is one method that I find is often overlooked. Personally I’ve known vaguely what they did for years, but never fully understood the mechanics until quite recently. Frankly, they’re a little weird, so using them often requires a bit of a rethink.

    With some help from the Bradys, some CSS and touch of virtual electricity, I’ve pulled together a couple of examples showing how siblings selectors work.

    So, if you never *quite* got your head around how the tilde (~) and plus (+) signs work in CSS, here’s the perfect four-minute dash to get you on track.

    Again, we’re using Lea’s awesome Dabblet for the examples, and you can play along here:

    Enjoy!