csslisted

# CSS CSS is forgiving and subjective — there is rarely one "correct" stylesheet. Optimise for **consistency, low specificity, and not breaking the user**, not for rule-compliance. This file is the whole standard for most styling work; pull a ref only when you need depth. The single biggest lever is **matching what the codebase already does**. A convention you'd not have picked, applied consistently, beats a "better" one applied unevenly. Propose a methodology or tooling migration (BEM ↔ utilities, adding Tailwind, swapping Sass) as its own explicit task — never as a drive-by inside a feature change. ## Principles (battle-tested) 1. **Keep specificity low and flat.** Style with a single class, keep selectors shallow, and avoid IDs and `!important`. Low, even specificity is what keeps styles overridable — most CSS pain is a specificity war that someone started and everyone else inherited. When cascade order genuinely matters, control it with `@layer`, not by piling on selectors. → `refs/architecture.md` 2. **Scope by default.** Leaking styles is the root cause of most "why did *that* change?" bugs. Reach for CSS Modules, a naming convention (BEM/utilities), or `@scope`; keep bare element selectors to resets and base. → `refs/architecture.md` 3. **Tokenize; don't hardcode.** Keep one source of truth for colour, spacing, and type. Use custom properties for anything themeable, and derive values from a scale instead of scattering magic numbers. → `refs/theming.md` 4. **Lay out