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 Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Duplicate DeSandro&#8217;s CSS Effect

    I recently stumbled upon David DeSandro's website when I saw a tweet stating that someone had stolen/hotlinked his website design and code, and he decided to do the only logical thing to retaliate:  use some simple JavaScript goodness to inject unicorns into their page.

  • By
    Fullscreen API

    As we move toward more true web applications, our JavaScript APIs are doing their best to keep up.  One very simple but useful new JavaScript API is the Fullscreen API.  The Fullscreen API provides a programmatic way to request fullscreen display from the user, and exit...

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!