Over the weekend I found myself wanting some new electronic gear. Froogle and interest in its results kept pointing me back to http://reviews.cnet.com/, so I tried to stick with that for a while. I didn't like its mousetype or the results from minimum size or needing to zoom new tabs over & over again. I looked at it with Web Developer and found over 160k in 18 CSS files, plus some embedded CSS. o_O I spent the better parts of late Monday and yesterday stripping down those files for use as a site-specific user stylesheet, leaving mostly only the following rules:
position height width color text-decoration line-height font/font-family/font-size All position: absolutes I changed to position: relative. All heights except for obvious spacers I changed to auto. All but 3 widths I left alone. All instances of color:#333 - #999 (grays) I changed to #222 or darker. All instances of text-decoration: none I changed to underline. All px line-heights I changed to mostly 1.2. All font-families I changed to generic sans-serif. Most font-sizes I changed from various px to keywords. There were a small handful of sizes not set in px, most of which I also made larger. A few Hx rules that were set to normal weight I changed to bold. After those changes I ran my efforts on the individual pages through the validator. Next I converted every ruleset to a one line entry. Then I merged all of them into one, and sorted that. I then deleted obvious dupes. At this point I was really amazed how well it worked. I tweaked 3 widths to suit my preference, and created a generic iframe overflow and height ruleset. The result is a "mere" 74k at http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/css/share/cnet.css for any with any interest in the result of this exercise. Some floats push down from their intended postition, but I don't see that as any problem of significance. The pages are so complex it's hard to tell what layout is or isn't as intended. I'm curious how well or whether those on the list agree with me on the result's relative functionality, particularly considering the complexity of the original, and the limited amount of time I spent doing anything beyond reducing. I'm also curious if anyone tries user styles testing for breakage during their own development, in addition to the considerably easier use of minimum and zoom. I suspect this answer is no more than 1 in 100. -- "Let your conversation be always full of grace." Colossians 4:6 NIV Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 Felix Miata *** http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ css-discuss [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.css-discuss.org/mailman/listinfo/css-d IE7 information -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=IE7 List wiki/FAQ -- http://css-discuss.incutio.com/ Supported by evolt.org -- http://www.evolt.org/help_support_evolt/
