Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Detect Unmatched CSS Selectors with Helium

By  on  

One thing I can't stand is extra code.  Whether it's an extra CSS or JavaScript file that's been included by the page, bloated HTML, or unoptimized images, we're making our millions of of desktop and mobile visitors pay for our laziness and mistakes.  A great tool called Helium is available to help developers detect selectors in their stylesheets that are unmatched or malformed.  Let me show you how it works!

Get Helium

Start by including the script in your page and initializing Helium upon load:

<script type="text/javascript" src="js/lib/helium-css/helium.js" onload="helium.init()" async></script>

As soon as the page is loaded, the developer is presented with a textarea with which they may type page URLs to test.  These pages are then loaded and a report is generated, detailing the unused selectors, malformed selectors, and pseudo-selectors which should be tested manually:

Helium CSS Textarea

Helium CSS Result

Get Helium

Helium is an excellent tool for identifying legacy and unnecessary CSS.  The information provided by Helium allows developers to remove unused CSS or better segment site CSS.  This tool is the perfect utility for developers looking to quickly optimize their CSS code.  In fact, I've not seen a tool so easy to implement and use.  Let me know if you agree!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Elegant Overflow with CSS Ellipsis

    Overflow with text is always a big issue, especially in a programmatic environment. There's always only so much space but variable content to add into that space. I was recently working on a table for displaying user information and noticed that longer strings were...

  • By
    Making the Firefox Logo from HTML

    When each new t-shirt means staving off laundry for yet another day, swag quickly becomes the most coveted perk at any tech company. Mozilla WebDev had pretty much everything going for it: brilliant people, interesting problems, awesome office. Everything except a t-shirt. That had to change. The basic...

Discussion

  1. Adrian

    Did you know about mincss, written by our own Peterbe? It seem to serve the same purpose, see http://www.peterbe.com/plog/mincss

  2. PH

    Does it do the same job as CSS Usage ? (Firebug extension)

    • BlaineSch

      PH, this tool appears to support checking selectors across multiple pages. CSS Usage is current page only.

  3. BlaineSch

    PH, this tool appears to support checking selectors across multiple pages. CSS Usage is current page only.

  4. Lovely

    Very interesting tools , i will try it now.

    Thank you

  5. Chris

    It’s a handy tool apparently but not a lot of people are using it? It is not efficient enough, or.. I haven’t tried it yet.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!