One of ITCSS's fundamental principles (opens in new tab) is the Specificity
Graph. This is another model that visualises your CSS project's specificity on a simple line graph. Its shape will tell you how well your project meets the low-to-high specificity metric.
The Specificity Graph represents your entire project – all your CSS, once compiled and on the user's machine. Along the X-axis we plot the location of a selector in the CSS (e.g. line 1229), and on the Y-axis we plot the specificity of that selector (e.g. one class).
What we want to see is a graph that trends upwards – a CSS project whose specificity is gradually increasing as we get further into it.
We do not want a very spiky graph, as this shows us we have a lot of higher specificity selectors defined before lower specificity ones – this is how we get into the Specificity Wars.
Whilst it is possible to accurately plot this information, the graph's value is in being a mental model. You can determine the rough shape of your project's Specificity Graph at a glance.
Words: Harry Roberts
Harry Roberts is a consultant frontend architect and CSS architecture expert. Find him on twitter @csswizardry (opens in new tab) or visit his site csswizardry.com (opens in new tab). This article was originally published in net magazine (opens in new tab) issue 267.
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