To play devil's advocate: there's a case to be made that reverse nesting is precisely the the _most reasaonable_ case for nesting, and that forward nesting is t

To play devil's advocate: there's a case to be made that reverse nesting is precisely the the _most reasaonable_ case for nesting, and that forward nesting is the one to be avoided. The problem with nesting is that it is seductively easy to write, but encourages two coding issues that cause maintenance headaches later on. Firstly, it encourages high selector specificity, and that means potentially enjoying specificity battles later on. Secondly, it encourages tightly coupled DOM structure with CSS - and tight coupling makes later development more expensive. Both of these issues are significantly less serious when using reverse nesting than forward nesting. Forward nesting allows for expressing the concept of "parts of a component" by it's DOM structure, so when the component is tweaked, selectors that aren't explicitly tied to any part of a component suddenly break. But reverse nesting is more natural to use in the context of expressing a special case; i.e. my thingmabob is generally green, but in this specific context it's grey. So on coupling, reverse nesting is less risky: whil it's not impossible to "compress" your css and thus introduce coupling between component structure and a reverse nested selector, it's not a very natural mistake to make. And on specificity too, reverse nesting is less likely to cause surprises - after all, since you're expressing a more specific situation, you're almost always likely to want the nested selector to win that specificity battle. So, I'd argue that reverse-nested selectors are actually one of the few general class of nested CSS selectors that are unlikely to cause maintenance headaches later on. Similarly harmless are nested media selectors (again, because nesting implies expressing an exception), and nested pseudo-elements (because there structure and CSS are intrinsically coupled an expressed within the CSS anyhow). What you call "reverse nesting" is actually the only best good kind of nesting. QED?