Ask HN : How to keep my CSS clean?
7 comments
Dust-Me Selectors (http://www.sitepoint.com/dustmeselectors/) has worked for me along with getting organised in CSSEdit (http://macrabbit.com/cssedit/).
Best approach I've found to keep it all under control and avoid getting in a mess in the first place is to use SASS (http://sass-lang.com/) & Compass (http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass).
Best approach I've found to keep it all under control and avoid getting in a mess in the first place is to use SASS (http://sass-lang.com/) & Compass (http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass).
I can't say enough good things about Sass. Compass is pretty sweet too.
Seconding this. Just started using it last week, learned everything I needed to know in a distraction-filled day or two. Any CSS pro could pick up HAML/SASS in a matter of hours, if not less.
CSSEdit is a Godsend. Also, using Compass = pure win. I use it for all of my projects nowadays.
I use sass/compass everyday, changed the way I write CSS.
Since you mention .erb, I'm guessing Rails. There was a Railscast covering this exact thing recently: http://railscasts.com/episodes/180-finding-unused-css
I've started using the 960.gs grid system to design sites and it allowed me to reuse more style sheet code therefore reducing the total lines of css.
The 960.gs helps me keep my css clean because I'm able to establish the bulk of the site design using predefined grid classes as opposed to custom defined classes which are tightly coupled to a particular layout.
The 960.gs helps me keep my css clean because I'm able to establish the bulk of the site design using predefined grid classes as opposed to custom defined classes which are tightly coupled to a particular layout.
Yes! I'm a huge fan of 960.gs and also Blueprint. Both allow me to focus on aesthetics as opposed to, say, how to make a 4 column layout work in IE6. It's probably cut the time it takes me to layout a page design in half.
This may not be as popular but I also started writing my styles on a single line (eg #header {height: 100px; background: silver; padding: 0 0 20px 0;}). I've found it much easier to scroll through my stylesheets and find the classes I'm looking for.
This may not be as popular but I also started writing my styles on a single line (eg #header {height: 100px; background: silver; padding: 0 0 20px 0;}). I've found it much easier to scroll through my stylesheets and find the classes I'm looking for.
I like 960.gs a lot. I've also used both YUI grids and blueprint with compass which are also great. To the OP, any combination of a grid system with Sass will make CSS much more of a pleasure to work with.
I would recommend using code folding over single line CSS which can easily get cluttered. By using cold folding you get the benefit of having one line per style, but you can jump down into a particular declaration and still have the readability of multiline styles.
I would recommend using code folding over single line CSS which can easily get cluttered. By using cold folding you get the benefit of having one line per style, but you can jump down into a particular declaration and still have the readability of multiline styles.
Yes, I'm a big fan now of throwing all my css for a class or id in a single line. The same dang rules are in all the classes or ids, so it's not that big of a deal to look across the line and quickly modify say the height. This reduces the number of lines in your css file by a factor of 5x.
+1 for you for using grids. Nowadays I try to design everything for YUI's base CSS library (reset-fonts-grids).
I never even really thought of this until you mentioned it. There's probably a ton of unused elements in my css.
Just found a firefox tool that helps with this: http://www.sitepoint.com/dustmeselectors/
Just found a firefox tool that helps with this: http://www.sitepoint.com/dustmeselectors/
DustMeSelectors is a nice tool for some applications. Here's how you use it.
Option 1: Give it a site map. It will scan everything and give you a list of unused selectors.
Option 2: Load up one of your pages and tell it to scan. It will give you a list of unused selectors on that page. Go to another page and scan. It will narrow down the previously-gathered list (if a selector was unused on the first page but is used on the second page, it is removed from the list). Repeat until you've covered everything you need to.
When you're done, you can export the unused selector list to a CSV file. Each column is a style sheet, and each row is a selector.
It's a lot faster than doing it by hand, but it does assume that you can see everything that anyone can see. At the very least, you can take that list and search your files for <div class="crazyselector"> and see if it is truly never used. If it's the only occurance, maybe you can refactor that HTML to use a more common selector.
When you're done, you can export the unused selector list to a CSV file. Each column is a style sheet, and each row is a selector.
It's a lot faster than doing it by hand, but it does assume that you can see everything that anyone can see. At the very least, you can take that list and search your files for <div class="crazyselector"> and see if it is truly never used. If it's the only occurance, maybe you can refactor that HTML to use a more common selector.
The problem is that a CSS selector in a rails project may be hidden to you but not to someone else. Thus, it would consider that some selectors are not used when they are by other users.
Ahh I gotcha, I'm unfamiliar with rails dev. Thanks.
Well, that’s standard web app dev really. You have different users, and they have different pages available to them.
I work on a Rails site with about 5000 lines of CSS. There are spidering tools and other things that you can use to scan for the existence of a class, but I think those tools are often dangerous because in most applications there are tons of pages and/or conditional content that a spider will never see.
So far I haven't found anything more reliable than simple grepping. This can range from completely awesome if your class/id names are unique in the codebase, to painstakingly tedious if you have generic class names that match your controllers, models, libraries and everything else. However given all the places that a CSS name could hang out, it has proven to be the most robust.
So far I haven't found anything more reliable than simple grepping. This can range from completely awesome if your class/id names are unique in the codebase, to painstakingly tedious if you have generic class names that match your controllers, models, libraries and everything else. However given all the places that a CSS name could hang out, it has proven to be the most robust.
5000 lines of CSS? You really need to re look at how you have used CSS. I can not imagine any web application needing that many lines of CSS.
Actually I know amazingly well what I'm doing with CSS. I've been wrangling CSS since IE4/NS4. The reason we have so much CSS is because the site was not originally designed by a web designer. It was designed page by page by a graphic designer. We have 125 controllers and over 300 templates, plus several dozen static pages. Many of these pages have custom layouts and typography.
The reason we have 5000 lines of well-organized CSS instead of 10000 lines of poorly-organized CSS is thanks to some heavy refactoring that we have done after most of the pages had been built. Don't underestimate the cost of building a unique brand. We can't all get by on 37signals style.
The reason we have 5000 lines of well-organized CSS instead of 10000 lines of poorly-organized CSS is thanks to some heavy refactoring that we have done after most of the pages had been built. Don't underestimate the cost of building a unique brand. We can't all get by on 37signals style.
"Don't underestimate the cost of building a unique brand. We can't all get by on 37signals style."
WTH does this mean in this context? Not being snarky; I can't figure it out for the life of me.
WTH does this mean in this context? Not being snarky; I can't figure it out for the life of me.
If I was building the site from scratch I would build it in such a way to minimize markup as CSS. I would probably do minimal Photoshop mockups and iterate rapidly in HTML/CSS, and the design would be very much driven by efficiency of the markup and CSS.
However in our case we had a graphic designer who had never done anything on the web before. This may seem like an insane way to design a web product, but the result is that we ended up with a brand that was entirely unique on the web, and this gave us a real tangible benefit when it came to attracting our initial userbase and business partnerships.
In the end the same functionality could have been built and reasonably well styled with 1000 lines of CSS, but we purposefully chose to go the longer route for branding purposes.
However in our case we had a graphic designer who had never done anything on the web before. This may seem like an insane way to design a web product, but the result is that we ended up with a brand that was entirely unique on the web, and this gave us a real tangible benefit when it came to attracting our initial userbase and business partnerships.
In the end the same functionality could have been built and reasonably well styled with 1000 lines of CSS, but we purposefully chose to go the longer route for branding purposes.
I work on a giant Rails site that has over well over 5,000 lines of CSS – when you are working on custom promotions, dozens of dynamic pages, and accounting for user generated content the CSS files get long.
Deadweight: http://github.com/aanand/deadweight/ might be what you're looking for.
Is there something that goes trough all your html (or .erb or whatever) and tell me which CSS element is unused?