The case against generic section libraries

A generic section library is built to look good in its own demo. The moment you drop a section into a real site, the cracks show.

What goes wrong

• Hard-coded values. The padding is 32 pixels because someone typed 32, and it never matches your spacing scale.
• Its own colours. The accent is whatever the designer liked, so you override it on every section.
• Its own fonts. Every section ships a type stack your site did not ask for.
• No contract. Class names change from one section to the next, so nothing is predictable.

What we do instead

Etchedy patterns read your Automatic.css tokens for colour, type, spacing and radius, with sensible fallbacks so they still look right when ACSS is missing. Class names follow one BEM convention, and every pattern is checked against the same rules before it ships.

The result

A pattern you paste today restyles itself when your tokens change tomorrow. There is nothing to override section by section, and nothing to relearn between patterns.

A library should disappear into your site. If you can still tell which sections came from it, it is doing the wrong job.