Why Functional CSS will probably never be popular, but is still awesome.

The Haters

So you don't have to look far to find a hater of Functional CSS. Basically "anyone who's anyone" in the CSS world seems to hate it.

Aaron Gustafson, chief editor of A List Apart, former manager of the Web Standards Project, Microsoft employee.

Mozilla Engineer, Soledad Penades

From the creator of CSS Zen Garden

What happens with big redesigns? Is it about the same, time- and difficulty-wise, or do you spend more time tearing down all those classes? What happens when you need a style that isn't available? Write your own? Or does that ruin the spirit of all this and put you in dangerous territory? How intense can all the class names get? I can think of areas I've styled that have three or more media queries that dramatically re-style an element. Putting all that information in HTML seems like it could get awfully messy. Is consistency harder or easier?

~ Chris Coyier

Ok maybe he doesn't in all situations...

One thing that is often hard to articulate with new tooling is when, exactly do you start to reach for this? The answer is rarely (if ever) immediately and in all situations

One of those situations, in my limited experience, is on large teams with large codebases. The feeling is that the CSS can get far too large and team members essentially become afraid of it, and the CSS becomes jokingly-but-accurately “append-only”.

Along comes a tool that delivers on a promise of shipping far less CSS and in a way that (after a learning curve) nobody is ever afraid of again… I can see the appeal.

~ Chris Coyier

Small Components

Taking a component-first approach to CSS means you create components for things even if they will never get reused. This premature abstraction is the source of a lot of bloat and complexity in stylesheets.

The smaller the unit, the more reusable it is.