Did I just invent that word? Most developers using CSS layouts have likely heard of “divitis” (using far too many DIVs in your markup). But what about “attributitis” (or, Attribute-itis, if you will) — the distant cousin of divitis? I didn’t bother googling that word to see if anyone else has used it; I’m hoping I’ve coined it! I thought of it this morning while helping a coworker debug a CSS problem. It struck me that the class and ID attributes that are commonly added to HTML tags can really get out of hand if they aren’t controlled properly. Let’s discuss a few points that will ensure cleaner code and better future development time through the practice of avoiding attributitis.

While working on medium to fairly large websites, I’ve recently found it helpful to apply certain coding practices in my CSS files to help readability, and to ensure that any future developers (including me) will have little difficulty editing the CSS code. Since my main CSS files nowadays often end up being anywhere from 1000 to 2000 lines long, here are some quick tips that I think help CSS code to be more readable and web developer-friendly.