Description
In the design principles for appearance: base there are two principles stated that interact with each other:
- 5.1.: They use minimal code and are easy to override.
- 6.: They are comprehensive:
- 1.: Covering all states for each control.
The introduction to the list says that the earlier principles (5 in this case) are more important than the later ones (6 in this case). This makes it seem like the "minimal code" principle overrides the "cover all states" principle, since covering all states requires a substantial amount of code with selectors for each state.
However, I think the important design principle of 5.1, whose goal I think is that the styles are easily overridable, isn't strictly minimal code, but rather minimal number of CSS properties used (and perhaps also clear separation of the purposes that they're used for).
In other words, I think it's fine to have a substantial amount of code where button, button:enabled:hover, button:enabled:active, button:disabled all have distinct declarations of the background-color property, and we shouldn't avoid that because the "minimal code" principle is more important than the "cover all states" principle.
This makes me thing we should reword the "minimal code" wording to be more specific about minimizing the things we care about minimizing. I think one of these is the number of CSS properties used. But there might also be something else here about consistency of the ways that they're used.