The Dust-Me Selectors User-Interface

The page describes the user-interface for Dust-Me Selectors.

Main controls

This is the main icon. Click it to begin a Find operation, or to stop the operation when one is in progress.

When a Find operation is in progress, the icon will be animated to indicate activity, and the statusbar will also show a running total of the number of unused selectors it's found, in how many stylesheets.

Once a manual find operations completes, a dialog will open automatically so you can view all the unused selectors that were found (this behavior can be changed in the preferences).

The Unused selectors tab in the view dialog shows you a list of all the unused selectors that have been found, grouped by which stylesheet they're in. If you have DOM Inspector the dialog will also show you the line-number of each selector. The dialog also indicates stylesheets that couldn't be checked, and the reason.

The other two tabs are for Used selectors (all those selectors which are being used), and a Spider log that lists all the pages in the current site that have been automatically spidered (see spider controls below).

The view dialog has a context menu — select one or more item in the list and you can Mark it (an unused selector can be marked used, or a used selector can be marked unused); you can perform this operation on all items in a group by clicking the group header. You can also Restore marked selectors, which will undo any manual marking for both used and unused selectors simultaneously.

Selection works just like a normal window or folder — click to select; drag, shift-click or ctrl-click (command-click for Mac) to select multiple items; or use Tab and shift-arrow for keyboard selection. The context menu can be activated with the keyboard by tabbing to an item and pressing the Enter key.

You can save the data from any tab in CSV format, suitable for importing into a spreadsheet program. Press the Save as CSV... button when viewing that tab, enter a filename or select an existing file, and the data will be saved to that file.

The main menu in the Tools menu contains all the available options.

Find redundent selectors is the same as clicking on the statusbar icon; Stop is the same as clicking the icon when a Find operation is in progress.

Below that is the Automation menu, which contains two options.

The first options, Run at page load, set the extension to run automatically in response to page load events. When this setting is enabled, a Find operation will begin whenever a new page is loaded (it will run on the page you're viewing). With automatic Find operations the view dialog does not automatically open at the end (this behavior can be changed in the preferences).

The second option, Spider sitemap..., opens the spider dialog (detailed below).

Below the automation menu are two further items, to open the view dialog, and to clear all saved data. When clearing saved data you will be asked for confirmation (confirmation to clear data for individual sites can be controlled from the preferences; but when clearing data for all sites, confirmation is always required).

And below those are options to disable the extension completely (when disabled, a tick will show next to this item, and the status icon will be grayed out), and to open the preferences dialog.

The main menu is also available as a statusbar context menu. You can remove the statusbaricon if you wish, and have only the Tools menu available (for example, if you have limited space in the status bar because of other extensions); that option can also be found in the preferences.

Spider controls

The spider dialog has all the controls for performing a site-wide spider operation. Enter the URL of either a Sitemap XML file, or an HTML sitemap, and the program will read that file and extract all its links. It will then load each of those pages in turn and perform a cumulative Find operation on each one.

The URL text box includes history and auto-complete, very similar to the behavior of Firefox's main address bar (and in fact, shares its history with the main browser).

The Go button initiates a spider operation; the Stop button abandons it (the data for each completed page so far will be saved). The Skip button can be used to skip over individual pages as they're being checked.

Once a spider operation is complete the view dialog will open automatically (which can be controlled from the preferences), or at any time you can press the View saved selectors... button to view the data for the site being spidered; if you press this during a spider operation it will show you the data that's been gathered so far (at the point when you press it). Data for each page is saved at the end of checking that page, so when opening the view dialog during a spider operation, you'll be viewing the data up to and including the last completed page.

While a spider operation is in progress, the dialog will expand to show status information for the current operation. The progress meter gives an indication of the overall completeness, while the text to the right shows how many unused selectors have been found, in how many stylesheets, over how many pages. The activity icon to the right of that can be used to stop the spider operation, just like the main browser interface.

Below that, the status text shows the address of the page currently being checked; if the page is on the same domain as the sitemap itself then only the path will be shown, otherwise the complete URL will be shown. The numbers in brackets show which page we're currently on, and the total number of links found in the sitemap.

There may be a discrepancy between those figures, and the page number shown in the progress area, and this is because some of the links in the sitemap may have been to files that cannot be checked, such as scripts or stylesheets, or anything else that isn't an HTML page.

Finally, the OK button will abandon any currently running spider operation and close the dialog.