Elise Hein compiled a few arguments in favor of using CSS attribute selectors more often. Two examples stood our for me.

Consider existing attributes. Whenever we add state we should take a step back and consider if we can leverage a standard. I often add an .is-active class to links in navbars. However, there’s an ARIA attribute for that. In addition to using a standard, our site becomes more accessible.

a[aria-current="page"] { }

Make invalid states impossible with data attributes. In HTML, we could accidentally end up with a card that .is-small.is-large. Using a data attribute enforces a single value for the attribute.

.card.is-small { }
.card.is-large { }
// vs
.card[data-size="small"] { }
.card[data-size="large"] { }

Read the full post on Elise Hein’s blog.