More CSS Tips and Tricks
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) came on the scene over 15 years ago and, on a very basic level, changed the way websites looked and acted. This dialect has continued to advance throughout the years and its various updates are intended to engage designers and developers in order to manufacture websites which are beautiful, effective, and increasingly lightweight. In our introductory blog in this CSS series, we demonstrated display:none; and its uses. The second installation provided an overview of CSS3, while the third discussed CSS Syntax. Before we move forward, let’s take a moment to add a few more general tips and tricks to our arsenal, helping you to take full advantage of CSS and each one of its updates.
Use a decent proofreader. You may be a coding master, but two heads are always than one, as they say. Being ready to approve and turn upward codes, the auto-complete element, and syntax highlighting won't just speed up your work, it will allow for more precision in your stylesheets.
Compress wherever possible. Use an effective compression device to cleave off the bytes from your CSS and JavaScript files wherever possible without deleting substance. This ensures that your website remains unencumbered and loads quickly. One approach to decrease undesirable bytes in your CSS files is to erase copy references, conflicts, and comments. Despite the fact that comments, for example, make it easier for someone else to maintain your files, they increase the record size significantly. It's better to just compose your codes and orchestrate them such that your files are promptly comprehensible. Also, store at any point you can in order to enhance loading times and preserve the bandwidth of your website visitors. It’s worth noting that enhanced loading times also improves the search engine optimization (SEO) prospects of a website and drives it up the Google ranks. You can enhance the execution of your website by using just a single stylesheet that slashes the quantity of HTTP requests.
Increase the meaningfulness of your stylesheets. You can do this in a number of ways, but the simplest is to include white spaces. While this technique will inevitably increase the size of your CSS files slightly, you can ensure that the intelligibility will also enhance manifold times. Make sure that you keep the code format consistent. Another nifty way to ease the maintenance of your stylesheet is to eliminate inline codes. Also, keep the CSS record names simple so that you know at a glance the contents of each document.
Disable CSS to investigate. All browsers have assembled debuggers. Take in the hot keys to initiate these tools. In any case, if you can't spot the glitch even after cautious scrutiny, verify that you disable CSS or evacuate every one of the styles before bringing them back, each one in turn, to simulate the glitch.
Check your codes on all the significant browsers. This is likely the simplest of all CSS tips and yet so many programmers tend to ignore it. Try not to use a browser emulator to check code. Rather, check your codes on the genuine browser or a virtualized version. And don’t forget to keep an eye on all the major browsers - Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari.
The aforementioned five CSS tips and tricks should, in a perfect world, be strictly adhered to as best practices as they make easier the lives of developers, website administrators, Google spiders, and website visitors.
Hopefully you’re finding these tips and tricks helpful and we’ll have some more for you next week in our fifth installation of this six-part series. While we touched on vertical content alignment in our CSS3 blog, we’re going to delve deeper into that conversation in next week , so stop back and check it out.