Ask HN: Know of a good tool that finds unused stylesheet selectors and rules?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1405474

by apphacker • 16 years ago

7 5 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

It seems to be a common problem that as stylesheets mature and the project grows that eventually you may end up in a situation where you are not sure if various styles are still being applied anywhere. Does anyone know of a good way to figure this out with some kind of software tool?

jacquesm• 16 years ago

You can't really be sure without running all of your javascript code and checking all of your pages, after all some hidden bit of javascript might change a style based on some event to match one in the css, it might even do it by combining various terms to form the selector, and it might manipulate the ids and classes of elements already on the page.

That's a tricky problem. I'm not aware of a tool, but if you find one I'll be happy to test it, I have a few of those questionable items in my style sheets that are still there 'just in case'.

mixmax• 16 years ago

So do I, and it's a pain. some of my CSS files feel bloated and unnecessarily big, but it's an even bigger pain to go through the whole codebase and check everything out by hand.

It's a problem and if there's a solution out there it would make me very happy.

tamersalama• 16 years ago

There's a firefox plugin. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5392/ It has been a while since I last used it but it generally gave good indications.

rarestblog• 16 years ago

Google Chrome. Ctrl+Shift+J, Audits tab, Run...

apphacker• 16 years ago

Wow! Thanks.

Ask HN: Know of a good tool that finds unused stylesheet selectors and rules?

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