CSS Tweak!
The popularity of CSS Tweak has blown me away over the last couple of days. After being picked up by Wired, the number of daily optimizations has gone through the roof!
For people who have no idea what I’m talking about, CSS Tweak is a web based CSS optimization tool. It will take any CSS file and optimize the syntax, grouping your style declarations into shorthand where possible. It can also remove comments, and strip whitespace for maximum compression.
There are other tools out there that have more compression options, but I made CSS Tweak to be simple, fast and easy to use. This meant only including the features that I felt were the most useful. By concentrating on things like making the interface simple and straight-forward, the tool would be far more beneficial for the majority of users that wouldn’t want more advanced compression options.
One major difference from other tools however, is that you can stop it from altering your syntactical layout. Instead it will go through and stick with the code layout structure you have defined, and clean up any areas that are incorrectly formatted. Some other tools tend to reformat your CSS, and move things around.
I’m very flattered by people’s comments, it seems that people enjoy the simplicity and speed the most. Jeffrey Zeldman added the tool to his bookmarks over on Ma.gnolia which has flat out bowled me over! He mentioned that the tool could use a brief help page, which I’ve now added. Thanks Jeffrey.
I’ll be making a few updates to the tweaker over the next little while, I need to fix the pasting option I’ve fixed the pasting option, so you can now quickly paste your CSS into the tweaker.
Also, I need to clarify something – the tool doesn’t check the validity of your CSS. All it does is check that the file you are trying to tweak is actually CSS at all. I guess my error message is a little confusing. I did this to stop people uploading and trying to tweak JPEG’s or PDF’s for example. If you want to validate your CSS, use the W3C’s tool.
CSS Tweak is free and you can find it at: http://www.csstweak.com
Update: I have a forum set up where you can submit bug reports, or suggest enhancements for the tool. This way I can keep track of fixes to make for the next version.
23 People Added Their Comments
Great tool! Thanks!
instant favorite. bookmarked and easily accessible on my bookmarks toolbar [and del.icio.us].
This is really a lovely tool. My stylesheet is “lighter” now. Thanks!!!
(I wish there’s a CSS tweak for IE…… so pages will look good in all browsers.)
hi
It seems like your durable forum links are now leading tro your most recent post
(looking forward to durable 0.3)
regards
I upload a stylesheet file for test, but the result isn’t satisfactory: if i check “Remove White-Space” my file become unreadable (but it says 46% smaller)… if i leave my layout, instead, the percentage is near 20% but the result code is better only for “background” attributes. Margin attributes are ignored.
Just a suggestion for a future update - when you have IE-mac hacks in your css, csstweak will strip out the needed backslash hack comment. It needs to look for a backslash in a comment, leave that comment alone, and leave the next comment in too.
Uh, it really cool this tool. It saved about 26 percent. Not bad.
Daniele: Hacks is something the tweaker doesn’t take into account right now, so if you do have hacks, make sure you don’t remove comments.
I will implement this in the next version.
52%smaller
thanks
Nice tool. As this is something you’d probably only want to do before deployment (better yet testing of deployment) it’d be really handy if there were a webservice that could be integrated into a build process.
Nice Tool and a very good website design.
Thanks, you made my day
I just thought I’d try it and see, couldn’t hurt, I thought. WoW! It really sped up opening my pages more than I expected. It isn’t just a nifty tool that’s easy to use, it’s also doing a good job.
Thank you very much.
CSS optimization tools are cool, and yours seems quite good. Thank you.
Two other similar CSS tools I’ve used in the past might also be interesting: Style Sheet Optimiser, and CSS Formatter and Optimiser
as this is web based - any chance of a Dashboard widget version?
I like the idea of a dashboard widget. I’ll look into that.
amazing!
I just wanted to say keep up the great work! I’m currently trying to get the tweak to work with my site, http://www.freebieboom.com and any future sites I have in development. Well done team.
thank you so much for this tool. i believe especially because of its neat design, webdevelopers are attracted by this tool and they test it, just to see what happens
especially the css-shorttags seem to make a great impression to developers.
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with this nice tool you call attention to the possible optimizations of a large number of stylesheets and because of this also the possibilities to save the user valuable time and the webmaster bandwith in the long term. thanks man
I was wondering if you’d be willing to release the source to CSS Tweak. I am interested in combining it with Shaun Inman’s CSS Server Side Comments. Basically I’d like to have a tool that can do both things at once, without having to rely on a service.
While I could reverse engineer my own version of it, it seems a bit more trouble than it’s worth
I figured I’d ask first.
Thanks for your work on this, it’s really cool.
- Alex
It’s really a great tool. Thank you very much.
At last, I got it, what I was looking for. Thanks.
Did it get taken down? What happened? It doesnt work now.
cssdev.com/csstweak is in fact unavailable, seems the site is being redone