Comments on: CSS Minification; Part 72; Alphabetizing

By: simon000666

simon000666 — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 08:22:53 +0000

I’ve also been alphabetizing properties for readability for a while, at first it feels counter-intuitive to have for example height before width, but then after a while it becomes natural – and firebug does it automatically too.

@ywg is right though, the order can be sensitive to the style so it could break layout if you made it an automated process – best to have some kind of pre-commit hook that rejects if it see’s properties out of order…

By: ywg

ywg — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 07:18:06 +0000

Well “alphabetizing” does not improve compression. Ordering can help optimizing LZ77, but alphabetical order is not always the better choice.

Besides :

private void sortProperties(Property[] properties) {
Arrays.sort(properties);
}

CSS rules and instructions are order sensitive. Your implementation can break some stylesheets.

ex :
line-height: 18px;
font: 12px/16px sans-serif;

will be re-ordered to:
font: 12px/16px sans-serif;
line-height: 18px;

By: Darkimmortal

Darkimmortal — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 20:55:11 +0000

This site desperately needs a fluid width centre column.

Actually, you don’t need anything but the centre column.

By: blepore

blepore — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:16:27 +0000

Does the alphabetizing thing really help if you follow Google’s recommendation to use CSS rules only once? Sure, there are some rules like padding where you may have different values for the property, but it seems a bit negligible.

By: WillPeavy

WillPeavy — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 13:11:25 +0000

Cool. I’ve been alphabetizing properties for a while now, for readability. Good to see this inadvertently offers a performance benefit too!

By: sixtyseconds

sixtyseconds — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:37:18 +0000

Please reduce image sizes. It’s not rocket science.