One of the often-touted new features of VS 2008 is the improved CSS support.
I like having intellisense for CSS, sure, but I dont’ want to have a warning for classes that don’t exist…. like this:
That green squiggly indicates a compiler warning. It can’t find the CSS class, (which is referenced in the Master Page).
But there are other reasons why you might want to define a class without defining an associated style. You might be using it to distinctly select elements from the DOM using javascript.
The ever-so-awesome prototype framework introduced this syntax:
$$(‘.info’)
which would select all of the elements with a class name of “info” for you to work with.
Just about every other javascript library out there now supports this syntax (or a similar one).
If this bugs you, you can turn it off by checking this box (in Tools -> Options) :
You may not want to do this, though… it could potentially save you time if you’re looking for a rendering bug.
Another part of VS 2008 that I don’t really care about is this CSS designer. I can’t imagine anyone who would actually use this.
I mean, come on… look at it!
I guess if you don’t know CSS very well, you might want some options. But that form is more confusing to me than border-top: solid 1px #999;.
(and one could argue, if you don’t know CSS, should you be defining styles at all?)
I really applaud Microsoft’s attempt to bring a better CSS development experience to the masses, but I think they missed the mark on this one.