> changes intended for one place end up messing something up elsewhere. Maybe I'm just not using it right? CSS selectors allow you a really wide latitude in th

> changes intended for one place end up messing something up elsewhere. Maybe I'm just not using it right? CSS selectors allow you a really wide latitude in the applied scope of the styles you specify -- you can literally pick everything (with the asterisk selector), or you can pick only one thing (with an id selector). With an almost arbitrarily fine-grained set of possibilities in between. A project could take a component centered approach, with unique id and/or class names for every component and only using selectors that begin rooted with those id/class names (the unique names thing can be harder with a large team than it should be -- I've sometimes thought that rather than a CSS preprocessor, I could use a smart linter that can take some comment hints and manage problems like this better). Or you could moderate that a bit with a reasonable core set of global styles addressing typography and baseline margins/padding and a few layout concepts, and go component from there. And then follow two heuristics: when you find you're playing whack-a-mole, you probably do have too many overlapping broadly scoped styles. If you're repeating yourself over and over again (or even relying heavily on a preprocessor to repeat yourself), you might be better served by a more broadly scoped selector. If this doesn't describe your approach, maybe you are indeed just not using it right. :) (And welcome to the club, happens to all of us at some point). If this does describe your approach and it still hurts more than a bit, well, maybe it is indeed the fault of CSS.