Commit 515b05a9 authored by Taddeüs Kroes's avatar Taddeüs Kroes

Documentation

parent a36e7321
......@@ -16,13 +16,13 @@ Features
- Ruleset merging (see below)
- Command-line interface and web interface
Ruleset merging
---------------
Apart from simply writing the CSS in a shorter format (i.e.
whitespace/color/shorthand compression), mincss attempts to restructure rule
sets into a shorter variant. For example:
sets such that the resulting stylesheet is the minimal representation of the
input. For example:
a { color: red }
p { color: red }
......@@ -34,33 +34,83 @@ can be written much shorter as:
Merging selectors is something that is done by the programmer in most cases,
but the example above may occur when multiple different CSS files are merged
into one, or when a large CSS file is structured in such a way that the
definitions of `a` and `p` are far apart. A special case is when the same
selector appears in different rulesets, which may happen when a framework
stylesheet is merged with a page-specific stylesheet:
definitions of `a` and `p` are far apart. Another thing that may happen is that
some framework file defines a default style for a selector, that is then
overwritten in a custom stylesheet, for example:
/* file: framework.css */
a {
color: blue;
font-weight: bold;
border: 1px solid red;
}
...
/* file: my-special-page.css */
a {
color: red;
border-color: blue;
}
This is merged into:
which can be merged into:
a {
color: blue;
font-weight: bold;
color: red;
border: 1px solid blue;
}
Because the `color` property is now overwritten in the same ruleset, the early
definition is removed:
a {
font-weight: bold;
color: red;
}
Compression phases
==================
To achieve the features listed above, the input stylesheet is rewritten in a
number of phases:
1. `parse`: Transform the input into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) in
accordance with the CSS syntax definition. This eliminates unnecessary
whitespaces and catches syntax errors.
2. `unfold`:
- Transform shorthand declarations into a separate declaration for each
expression in the shorthand.
- Duplicate rulesets for each of its selectors, so that every ruleset has
exactly one block of declarations.
3. `concat`: Concatenate different declaration blocks for the same selector.
Now, every selector has exacly one block of declarations associated with it.
4. `optimize`: Optimize individual declaration blocks by generating shorthand
declarations and simple compression on expressions (color compression,
removal of unnecessary string quotes, etc.).
5. `combine`: Try to combine declarations for different selectors, by comparing
each pair of rulesets and checking if a shorter representation is possible
by generating a shared ruleset.
Motivation
----------
The use of a proper CSS syntax definition for the parser, rather than a simple
ad-hoc tokenizer, assures that all unnecessary whitespace is ignored. The AST
definition also provides a convenient infrastructure for the subsequent
transformations.
The unfolding phase eliminates any clever constructions used by the programmer,
so that the following phases can make assumptions about the format of the
stylesheet and need not deal with, for example, shorthand declarations.
Concatenation of declaration blocks for the same selector is necessary in order
to generate a single minimal representation for each selector in the `optimize`
phase.
The `combine` phase is tricky to implement, since it is difficult to prove if
the resulting combinations are in fact the shortest possible representation of
the stylesheet. If this is not the case, the risk exists that while the
programmer efficiently merged some declarations for different selectors, the
compressor unfolds the ruleset and generates somethning longer.
*FIXME*: how do we solve this?
Building mincss
===============
TODO
Compression scores
==================
TODO: compare to existing minifiers
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