I've been looking for good CSS (stylesheet) articles that don't just teach the basics which I already know. This one looks pretty good so I write it down for later reading.

I have been experimenting recently with HTML optimization but haven't applied it yet. But I have applied this now to my stylsheets. The size gain is 33%! (1577 bytes to 1027 bytes) However, the speed gain involves also the time to perform the optimization so the speed gain will obviously be less than 33%. But the optimization takes, on this slow computer, 0.004 seconds so in approximate terms the speed gain is also 33%. This is on a stylesheet file with some but short and few comments.

Last week Fry-IT released CheckoutableTemplates which is a templating module add-on for Zope. It includes a module called slimmer.py which can compress XHTML, HTML and CSS. The CSS had a flaw in it that I hadn't foreseen. This flaw arises when you use M$ Internet Explorer hacks like this for example:

Great, yet small and neat, article here on web standards. Worth a read if you're still not convinced.

CSS and web standards is a great tool for producing good web pages. It allows you to separate out content from presentation. The CSS file should be given a lot of responsibility and be very powerful in terms of what it can control.