Web developers: CSS minifier & alphabetiser

[bvanoudtshoorn]

http://www.barryvan.com.au/2009/08/css-minifier-and-alphabetiser/

Yesterday, I wrote a little Java app that will not only minify your CSS, but also optimise it for gzip compression, saving you even more bandwidth.

A 78.2KB CSS file, which normally gzips down to 13.2KB now gzips down to just 11.5KB after being run through this app -- that's nearly 13% smaller. Check out the blog post linked above for more details and to download.

Oh, and it's released under the MPL, which should make most people happy.

[LPChip]

MPL is.... ModPlug Library? XD

[Rakib]

Mozilla Public License

[Saga Musix]

Some suggestions, if you're still working on it:
- Add an option to "approximate colours", i.e. to not only convert #112233 to #123, but also f.e. #112434 to #123.
- Convert rgba(100%,50%,100%,0.3) to rgba(255,128,255,0.3)

BTW, Something you might not be aware about and I haven't actually tried it, but anyway...
Have a look at those lines:

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border-left:3px solid #bbb;
border-color:rgba(255,255,255,0.8);
Browsers that don't know the rgba() macro will simply use #bbb as border colour (CSS forward compatibility), whereas more advanced CSS3 browsers will display a border with alpha channel (second line overrides #bbb in that case).
However, when ordering attributes alphabetically, this would not work anymore, because it would be #bbb for all browsers then.

[bvanoudtshoorn]

You're right Jojo, that particular snippet would stop working. :/ As a workaround, though, this should remain untouched:

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border: 3px solid #bbb;
border: 3px solid rgba(255,255,255,0.8);
The sort it does *should* be stable, and it's only sorted by the property name, not its value, so those two should stay in order. Not ideal, I know. :/

I'm "kinda" still developing it. I've put it up on GitHub [http://github.com/barryvan/CSSMin/], and we're using it at work in production, so I update it as we need to. If I get a chance, I do like your suggestions -- particularly the approximation of colours. There'd have to be some sort of "don't approximate this value" flag, though, perhaps as a special comment or something.

Because it's on GitHub, anyone who wants to can hack away at it -- it's also released under the MPL, so *anyone* who wants to can do *anything* they want with it, essentially.