CSS Style guide

“Outside In” — Ordering CSS Properties by Importance

A poll on CSS tricks found that a staggering 39% of developers order their CSS rules randomly, while 45% group by type.

I have taken ordering by type one step further, and created groups of properties with properties ordered within.

This method attempts to start with big picture stuff, like layout and size, and works towards finer details, like typography and list styles.

The name and inspiration for this method comes from Guy Routledge in this article.

The grouping and order I use is as follows:

Layout (position, display, top, bottom, flex, etc)
Box Model Properties (width, height, margin, padding, overflow, etc)
Border (width, height, radius, image, etc)
Background (color, image, position, size, etc)
Animation (transition, animation, etc)
Typography (font, line-height, align, color, shadow, decoration, quotes, white-space, etc)
List (style, position, type, image)
Table (layout, empty-cells, border-spacing, etc)
Navigation (nav-index, nav-left, etc)
Misc (zoom, counter, cursor, pointer-events)

Some other rules that I work by:

Width before Height
Properties affecting sides are ordered same as the shorthand order, following the W3C spec
- top, right, bottom, left
Border radius is
- top-left, top-right, bottom-right, bottom-left
Blank lines between groups of properties (if there are more than 4 properties)

You can view a full list of all properties in the correct order in All properties.txt

For a list suitable for use in an IDE, see IDE.txt or you can import the .editorconfig file

styles directory
- Contains individual files for each group of properties
build.sh
- Generates All properties.txt and IDE.txt from the files in styles