Collaborative CSS

A response to Tim Baxter's argument for replacing class-based CSS with a markup-centric approach. The author agrees that styling native HTML elements is valuable since web standards provide inherent semantic meaning, but argues that HTML alone is not expressive enough to capture the full design language of real-world web projects. Most projects require multiple variations of the same HTML element (e.g., newsletter form, search bar, contact form), which cannot be meaningfully distinguished by element selectors alone. The conclusion is that both approaches are needed: use meaningful HTML elements as a baseline, and supplement with class-based naming (like BEM) to represent the richer distinctions that designers create.