Are you unsure about your style sheets’ quality, or whether you’ve maxed out your options? CSS Optimization Basics covers the necessary mindsets, discusses the main optimization methods, and presents useful resources to write higher quality CSS.

CSS Optimization Basics

Preface

We live in exciting times; indeed politically, and in the context of this book, technologically. The times are exciting because there has never been a greater wealth of web technologies, tools, and resources to build ever more appealing and performant websites and apps.

Introduction

We all know the adage, “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” To me, we feed developers for a lifetime by teaching and cherishing certain mindsets . By themselves, they aren’t enough, but I view them as the foundation that shapes our work and our careers. They’re not all related to CSS optimization—that would be odd given that we’re dealing with so many different technologies—, but they’re generally useful. Let’s look at the key ones.

Development Mindsets

Let’s talk about our options for writing higher-quality CSS while we’re right at it, during development and in operation. This type of optimization benefits us as developers. (The next section will deal with options to optimize for production, that is, for release and live use, and for the benefit of our users.)

Operational Optimization

For production, we usually take care of all the things that are good for end users. Software can handle much of this. Some things, however, we benefit from doing ourselves. For example, we can get into the habit of writing more minimal CSS (as with omitting leading 0 ’s). Or, in static environments and in small projects, we can work with a single style sheet (to keep the number of requests low and to avoid future HTML changes), without resorting to tools.

Production Optimization

CSS optimization is important because we, especially as individuals, don’t always write perfectly efficient, understandable, and maintainable code.

Summary

The following is a small selection of useful CSS tools, sites, and books. They’re geared towards more experienced developers, yet novice developers may benefit from them as much, if not more, than staying with beginner materials.

Resources

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Feedback

Jens Oliver Meiert is a German web developer and author who has been a technical lead at companies like GMX and Google . He has written a few lightweight books about a variety of topics, notably quality web development. Online, he lives at meiert.com . Please say hello.

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