APEX News - February 2010
Disclaimer: Software and tools listed (with the exclusion of items marked tested) have not been tested thoroughly and APEX cannot be held responsible for any damage to your computer or for the performance of the programs and we are unable to guarantee that any external resources we mention in our newsletters will remain available online or are virus free. We recommend you ensure you have competent virus checking software installed on your computer.
CSS Optimization and Compression . . .
As web site owners/designers whether professional or amateur, we are always searching for methods by which we can speed up the loading of web pages. The creation of CSS aided us all immensely and this month we provide some tools that may assist even further. But why optimize your CSS at all? In a nutshell: for faster loading pages. Anything that can speed up the loading of our web sites has to be a good thing!
Clean CSS.
A powerful CSS optimizer and formatter that basically takes your CSS code and makes it cleaner and more concise. I have used this tool and found it to be excellent.
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CSS Compressor.
CSS Drive’s CSS Compressor does just that: compresses your CSS in either Light, Normal or Super Compact modes. Their Advanced Tool (also free), allows you to get specific (e.g. whether or not to leave spaces between selectors and properties, etc.) Use this utility to compress your CSS to increase loading speed and save on bandwidth as well. You can choose from three levels of compression, depending on how legible you want the compressed CSS to be versus degree of compression. The “Normal” mode should work well in most cases, creating a good balance between the two.
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CSS Analyser.
This online service not only verifies your CSS with W3C standards, it also tests your color contrast which is rather awesome. This tool has been provided to allow you to check the validity of your CSS against the W3C's validation service along with a colour contrast test and a test to ensure that relevant sizes are specified in relative units of measurement. If the CSS is specified by a URL, it will be loaded into the text area to offer an option to make changes for testing without having to re-upload.
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CSS Redundancy Checker
And last but not least, because redundancy is just not cool, especially when you’re trying to optimize your CSS, this nifty little tool is quick, easy to use and simple to understand. Use this tool to find CSS selectors that aren't used by any of your HTML files and may be redundant.
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Thanks to
Clean CSS
CSS Drive
Juicy Studio
I'm Mike
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