I spent some time today cleaning up my stylesheets on a big site I’m working on. I was stunned by how messy they were. I was able to reduce the size of my main stylesheet by 20%. Not only that, but this top-down review showed me a lot of structural problems that had accumulated over the months: styles that didn’t cascade properly, orphaned styles, redundant specifications, and even a couple of missing styles.
The result is that I’ve managed to resolve a few formating quirks that were due to stylesheet problems, improve the consistency of my site, and improve its performance.
CSS spring cleaning?
Barry Parr brings up a very good idea, revisiting and cleaning up your style sheets. I’ve been working on a big project, and as it grew during the development cycle I took a week to clean up and refactor the sheets so that, say, stats pages weren…