Csscss: a CSS redundancy analyzer that analyzes redundancy

geuis 13 years ago |

This could be an interesting companion to Helium. Helium-css can be used on live sites to find unused CSS. Combine with this project to remove duplicates too. https://github.com/geuis/helium-css

kevinconroy 13 years ago | |

This may be the single most helpful comment I've found on Hacker News. I've been looking for a tool like Helium for a while. Thank you!

ajtaylor 13 years ago | |

I'll echo the sibling commenter. We're in the process of rolling out a new site layout at $work and I suspect there is a LOT of leftover CSS rules which I can get rid of. Thanks very much for the link!

laurencei 13 years ago |

Personally I used Chrome dev tools - and it has a feature called 'CSS Selector Profiles' under the 'profile' tab.

You can 'record' yourself using a website - and Chrome records how many 'hits' each css rule gets.

This is better than Dust-me, and all the other CSS rule detectors - because it allows you to use your site in a 'dynamic' way - and test for all the edge CSS cases (like resizing your browser to small, or enabling an error message etc).

After using my SaaS for an hour - I found hundreds of rules that just never got used.

Also - it tells you how many times a rule got used. So I found a few number of rules that literally only got used once, and I could often re-write them into 1-2 bigger rules - further reducing my CSS overhead.

GhotiFish 13 years ago | |

That sounded really cool. So I opened up chrome, navigated to YouTube, opened the dev-tools, turned on CSS Selector Profiles, and chrome immediately crashed.

:( awwwww.

sergiotapia 13 years ago |

From the makers of the phenomenal Chosen jquery plugin.

http://harvesthq.github.io/chosen/

Hopefully this is indicative of the quality of this library! I'll definitely try it out this morning.

hackerboos 13 years ago | |

I prefer Select2 over Chosen

http://ivaynberg.github.io/select2/

ineedtosleep 13 years ago | | |

The problem with Select2 is that users are now _required_ to have js on to just use a silly dropdown. Chosen actually degrades gracefully.

windsurfer 13 years ago | | |

Yeah, and they lie in their first example. The "example code" is nothing like their real demo code. If it was, you'd be able to use their select boxes if you had JS disabled...

walshemj 13 years ago | | |

which you need in a lot of cases for search engine crawlability.

joeblau 13 years ago | | |

I'm using Select2 on my site http://gitignore.io/ and it's been awesome so far.

rkuykendall-com 13 years ago | | |

Just a side note, it took me a few tries to hit "OSX." My first two tries were "OS X" and "Mac OS X", before I noticed something was coming up and disappearing when I typed the "OS X"

antihero 13 years ago | | |

That's neat, but howcome something like Django doesn't "inherit" from the Python preset?

Semaphor 13 years ago | | |

Why? I haven't used either yet so it'd be interesting to hear your reasoning.

hackerboos 13 years ago | | |

IE7 support, better AJAX support and a ton more options.

publicfig 13 years ago | | |

Also, Chosen only works with the <option> tags, which can be quite annoying. And to me, the Select2 community seems a lot more active and able to participate in the project.

laumars 13 years ago |

It's rare that I feel any particular emotion towards project names, but the name and description behind this one is inspired.

jtheory 13 years ago | |

Except that by using redundancy in the name and description, they give the impression that their redundancy-removal skills are lacking.

Maybe the project should be named "cs"? :)

jQueryIsAwesome 13 years ago | |

The author also haves one of the best bios in twitter:

> I connect stuff and copy bits. Sometimes it doesn't work

zmoazeni 13 years ago |

If you're a ruby developer I strongly encourage you to check out the source code and parsing in general. This is heavily using parslet [1] to build a css parser [2]. I'm sure there are edge cases I have missed, but still the LOC for this codebase is relatively small and fairly readable.

Stay away from the RedundancyAnalyzer though. There be dragons.

[1] http://kschiess.github.io/parslet/

[2] https://github.com/zmoazeni/csscss/tree/ae2f22f4416bca35f903...

moonboots 13 years ago |

CSSO [1] is a tool that removes duplicate declarations during minification instead of just warning about them. It also performs more advanced structural optimizations.

[1] http://bem.info/tools/csso/

ecaron 13 years ago | |

I think the purpose of this package is more about making existing source code easier to maintain (applying DRY principals to CSS) than about browser-oriented optimization (thus purpose of CSSO.)

eru 13 years ago | | |

You could keep the csscss'ed source in version control (easy to maintain), and use csso as an automated step before deploying.

zmoazeni 13 years ago | |

css-ratiocinator [1] is also another tool someone mentioned to me after I launched cssscss.

[1] https://github.com/begriffs/css-ratiocinator and http://www.csstrashman.com/

susi22 13 years ago | | |

And rework [1] allows you to change url()'s, inline images, change vendor prefixes and more...

[1] https://github.com/visionmedia/rework

k__ 13 years ago | | |

Is there something that can do all of this and remove the unused css after clicking through the site with a browser?

tlrobinson 13 years ago |

I love the name and tag line.

antimora 13 years ago |

Here is something I came across at PyCon. This technique uses genetic algorithm to minimize the CSS. The author claims 10% improvement over the standard CSS minimizer.

Links:

- https://us.pycon.org/2013/schedule/presentation/178/

- https://github.com/ryansb/genetic-css

Snowda 13 years ago |

This. This makes me smile. For the name, tagline and the application.

nemrow 13 years ago |

I bookmarked this for sure! I'm the WORST at having tons of duplicate declarations!

pindi 13 years ago |

It seems like when run on SCSS mode, it expands mixins before running the redundancy check. For instance, two of my selectors both include three of the same mixins, which end up expanding into 23 rules, and CSSCSS reports 25 shared rules between them. (Further inspection confirms that exactly 2 normal rules are shared.)

I would think that using mixins should also count as having eliminated redundancy. A simple solution would be to ignore them, or more ideally the redundancy check could treat mixins just as a normal rule, so that it could detect using the same set of mixins in multiple places as redundancy.

zmoazeni 13 years ago | |

This has come up a couple times. I wouldn't mind this topic moving it to github so the conversation doesn't get lost. And others can contribute to it long after this gets buried on HN.

My initial opinion is that even though your SCSS code is consolidated, the resulting CSS code is still duplicated all over the place. To me, that is a code smell. Particularly when I need to debug from the web developer tools.

pindi 13 years ago | | |

Good idea, posted my reply: https://github.com/zmoazeni/csscss/issues/25

harlanlewis 13 years ago |

Great!

But, one issue. It appears to not support @import of Compass extensions: "File to import not found or unreadable."

notdonspaulding 13 years ago |

I'm upvoting this is for the cleverly redundant title that repeats itself and causes me to vote it up.

fungi 13 years ago |

We really need this, our css has grown in to a monster over the years.

This may also be of interest:

Dust-Me Selectors is a firefox extension that scans HTML pages to find unused CSS selectors. http://www.brothercake.com/dustmeselectors/

alex_doom 13 years ago |

Brilliant, I was just searching for a tool for this.

michaelwww 13 years ago |

Noob question: how do I know the selectors and inheritance rules are applied in the same way as the target platform?

mattyod 13 years ago |

Should have run an analyser against the sub heading for that article.

arvidkahl 13 years ago | |

Your post was successfully analyzed as redundant.

skeletonjelly 13 years ago | |

#mcbain.mcbain:after { content: ' That's the joke.' }

tylerhowarth 13 years ago |

Any support for scss/sass planned?

Jgrubb 13 years ago | |

Not only planned, but implemented and noted in the readme!