Buongiorno from 1 degree C Wtherby UK,
Ive realised that css principles dont stick in my head so ive started using acronyms to help remember stuff. For example (Hope this is tight) links pseudo classes have to be in a specific order e.g:
a:link
a:visited
a:hover
a:active
So i came up with: “Love valentines hate aids” (Ok this is bit strong, hope i dont get an admin infraction!)
So has anyone else come up with a usefull acronym / mnemonic to help remember a CSS principle?
Grazie Tanto,
David
Interesting. I’ve not needed these aids before because I write CSS every single day, thus repetition is what makes memorize these things.
I wouldn’t know that other people’s aids would help you, though? When it comes to memorizing stuff, most of us have our very own way of doing it. I, for example, best memorize stuff by assigning something an object and building a story out of those objects.
When I train my memory, I do it with a set of 52 cards and try to memorize these as fast as possible. I do that by telling a story, so each card is part of a story. Or, if I have to quickly memorize a phone number, then I divide the sequence of numbers into pairs and assign each pair an object (e.g. 25 is an orange). I do it this way because I’m mainly a visual person. You could do something like that with CSS (or anything else) as well.
The typical mnemonic used for that CSS Link Specificity is just: LoVe HAte (LVHA). I probably cannot even memorise and retrieve more than three of four numbers in a sequence. I apply my own customised coping techniques and strategies for memory storage since the normal conventional methods don’t usually work as well.
A variant of Robert’s mnemonic is “LoVe, HA!” (but actually, his makes mor sense, really). Few such memory aids have ever stuck in my mind, and they can often seem more trouble to learn that the actual info you want to remember. Only two others have ever really worked for me. I remember the RAVEN rule, which is to remind you that “affect” is a verb while “effect” is a noun. The other thing I remember is something I made up myself. I could never remember the Greek word for Spartan, which is “Lacedaemionios”—until I realized it sounded like “lack a dime on a horse”. Go figure. 
More link state acornyms here.
To remember the order of margins, padding and borders etc (e.g. margin{1px 2px 3px 4px})
Then use the mnemonic TRouBLe. (i.e. margin: top right bottom left)
Good one!
I always think of it like a clock, i.e. start at the top and work your way round to right, bottom and left respectively.
Yes that’s the one I use as its easier to visualise than working out the order of the letters in TRouBLe.
I also use the clock-wise technique for lots of stuff while designing. But, even more impotently to understand the Cascading Style Sheet Specificity I turn to online calculators:D