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!

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

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

  • By
    39 Shirts &#8211; Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon Using MooTools 1.2

    As you can probably tell, I try to mix some fun in with my MooTools madness but I also try to make my examples as practical as possible. Well...this may not be one of those times. I love movies and useless movie trivia so naturally I'm...

  • By
    Prevent Page Zooming in Mobile Browsers

    Ever since I got my iPhone, I've been more agreeable in going places that my fiancee wants to go. It's not because I have any interest in checking out women's shoes, looking at flowers, or that type of stuff -- it's because my iPhone lets...

Discussion

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

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

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

  4. Very interesting tools , i will try it now.

    Thank you

  5. 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!