CSS manipulation

[Scott Penrose]

On Tuesday, Oct 29, 2002, at 15:03 Australia/Melbourne, Nathan Bailey 
wrote:

> Scott Penrose <scottp at dd.com.au> wrote:
>> so that we can do this inheritance and output a single highly
>> optimised output file ?
>
> What is your intention for optimisation?  For ease of management, or
> improved browser speed?  Presumably, with every browser having a

Mostly browser speed, and implementation. If I can get a way to inherit 
correctly two style sheets, then I don't need to do it for 
implementation, which only leaves speed.

> different CSS engine, their parsing is optimised in different ways too
> -- can you be sure that your summarisation will actually improve
> performance, or may it slow it down?

You are talking about render performance, which generally does not 
bother me. Size of the files over the wire is number 1 on our must be 
smaller and fast list. Schools generally only have 128K (or some even 
64K) links, so you can imagine what a room full of computers does to 
that link.

> I would suspect the later, since the parser will only have to deal with
> each object once in a "flat" format, but will have to deal with objects
> multiple times in an "inherited" format.  However, I have never looked
> at a CSS parser's code :-)

Currently you can not compress a CSS (IE and some other browsers fail 
to load it, even though they SAY they support GZIP).

The intension with the groupings above is to keep the size of the file 
very small, but ALSO to make it so there is only one file.

One file means - only one request, smaller size.

With CSS, if you use the C bit (cascading) then you override the values 
you want, which means by design we have redundant information being 
sent to the browser, plus some browsers do it wrong.

I have reviewed a number of methods of doing this, and have come to the 
conclusion for our next release that 'it is too damn hard'(tm) :-)

Scott
-- 
Scott Penrose
VP in charge of Pancakes
http://linux.dd.com.au/
scottp at dd.com.au

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