The cost of repetition?

To fully reap the benefits of ECSS you need to be comfortable with the property and value repetition it creates. At this point, you may believe me deluded. With all this duplication, how can this ECSS approach be a viable option? I'll address that concern with one word: gzip.

OK, I lied. I'd like to qualify that further.

gzip is incredibly efficient at compressing repetitive strings

I was curious what real world difference the verbosity of repeated property/value pairs in an approach like ECSS actually made? An experiment:

The resultant CSS file of a ECSS based project I was working on, when gzipped (as it would be served over the wire), was 42.9 KB. That's a significantly sized CSS file.

The most common and verbose patterns that could be abstracted from this style sheet to an OOCSS class was a couple of Flex based rules that were used abundantly throughout to vertically centre content within their container. They were even more verbose thanks to the fact that there was...