Easily Audit CSS with Automated Tools.
Auditing CSS: What Tools Are Available?
The use of cascading style sheets (CSS) is increasingly popular, making it essential for web developers and designers to know how to audit CSS. As websites are becoming evermore complex, ensuring your stylesheets are clean and validate is becoming more and more important. Fortunately, there are a range of tools available that can help you audit your cascading style sheets in order to identify potential issues.
1. CSS Lint
CSS Lint is an open source tool for testing and validating your CSS code. It can detect helpful warnings about the style sheets as well as problematic errors that may occur. It’s available as a plugin for major browsers such as Firefox and Chrome, as well as an online web application. The plugin is useful for quickly scanning and fixing code while developing, while the web version enables you to diagnose a stylesheet for an entire website at once.
2. W3C CSS Validation Service
The W3C CSS Validation Service is an online service which validates the correctness of cascading style sheets according to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) standards. It’s a great tool if you need to ensure a large website follows the correct coding conventions. Additionally, its error reports are detailed and easy to read.
3. CSSChecker
CSSChecker is a free online tool which can scan webpages and identify any errors in the style sheets. It’s useful for finding small mistakes which can be easily overlooked. It also allows you to check multiple pages at once, making it ideal if you need to audit a website with multiple pages.
4. Dust-Me Selectors
Dust-Me Selectors is a free Firefox plugin which inspects webpages to find unused CSS selectors. It’s great for optimizing websites by removing redundant stylesheets and code. It can also provide detailed reports which identify the selectors used on each page.
Conclusion
Auditing CSS can be a daunting task, but thankfully there are plenty of tools available to help. From validation services to optimizers, there’s something for everyone. Have you used any of these tools before? Let us know in the comments!
