I see. That just goes against the way I naturally think, unfortunately— which is why I thought SASS was such a great breakthrough. I do understand it, though, because when I want to modify something in some over-written hunk of garbage CSS it is a real pain to try to get the selector that actually works (thank god for dev tools).
One of the challenges with CSS is that it has so many ways to do the same thing, and it needs that because there are so many different workflows.
If you are in an environment where you have 0 control over how the HTML is structured I can see where long selectors are helpful, but when you do have full control over the HTML they are a huge anti-pattern.
Agreed, if by "helpful" you mean "painful but necessary because the asshole that wrote it didn't put a unique class on the main target of the div." But nesting doesn't necessarily imply long selectors, if done properly IMHO. If I have full control, I can put a class on the likely-to-be-selected element (ultimate target- the content) that allows me to get to it immediately so that I can, say, change the font.
In other words, I like nested CSS when I have a nested structure on the page. Then each class relates to one thing, and I can maintain continuity of the outer containers (say) as I change the inner ones.
In the old days, we didn't have column inside of content inside of page inside of ..... We just had whatever we had and css nesting wasn't as logically congruent with the structure.
Now, though, we have hugely nested pages (which stinks, but whatever), including a lot of inline-written CSS and the only way to get to it is long selectors. I agree it's an anti-pattern.
But you can have nesting and not require long selectors. And if you do need them for some god-forsaken reason, they are easy to find from a SASS structure.
