I'm working primarily on Linux with Konqueror. To Firefox I resort only
for testing compatibility and when I need some feature from its Web
Developer extension. Thus my perspective is probably rather narrow. My
work with CSS all happens at a low level of abstraction. Basically, I
edit stylesheets by hand and get some abstraction by using a
preprocessor that allows me to use constants. I'm curious whether there
are tools that make working with CSS easier. Here are some things I can
think of

* Annotated HTML markup showing for each element which rules are
applied.
* Transformation from CSS2.1 to CSS1 with embellishments to the HTML
markup so that selectors find their target.
* A transformation that moves attributes up the cascade.
* Selector simplification. Given a few concrete documents, simplify
selectors so that they become shorter and still match the same
elements.

Do tools exist that provide functions like these? Are there other tools
you find helpful?

Michael

--
Michael Schuerig                  Airtight arguments have
mailto:michael@schuerig.de        vacuous conclusions.
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/   --A.O. Rorty, Explaining Emotions

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:21:38 +0200 in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, Michael Schuerig favored
us with...
> I'm curious whether there
> are tools that make working with CSS easier. Here are some things I can
> think of
>
> * Annotated HTML markup showing for each element which rules are
> applied.

Does Firefox have DOM inspector (as its parent Mozilla does)? DOM
inspector does an excellent job of showing which rules are applied to
the currently selected element, and the computed result of the rules.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator:      http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec:   http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator:      http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/20...e_wont_help_you

On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:21:38 +0200 in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, Michael Schuerig favored
us with...
> * Selector simplification. Given a few concrete documents, simplify
> selectors so that they become shorter and still match the same
> elements.

The problem with doing this is that it will most likely change the
specificity. And that in turn may change which selector applies to a
given element.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
HTML 4.01 spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
validator:      http://validator.w3.org/
CSS 2.1 spec:   http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/
validator:      http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/
Why We Won't Help You:
http://diveintomark.org/archives/20...e_wont_help_you

Stan Brown wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:21:38 +0200 in
> comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, Michael Schuerig favored
> us with... 
>
> Does Firefox have DOM inspector (as its parent Mozilla does)? DOM
> inspector does an excellent job of showing which rules are applied to
> the currently selected element, and the computed result of the rules.

Yes, that's available and works well when I want to look at a single
node. It's very unwieldy when I want to get an idea of the whole page.

Michael

--
Michael Schuerig                  Airtight arguments have
mailto:michael@schuerig.de        vacuous conclusions.
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/   --A.O. Rorty, Explaining Emotions

Stan Brown wrote:

> On Sat, 17 Sep 2005 19:21:38 +0200 in
> comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets, Michael Schuerig favored
> us with... 
>
> The problem with doing this is that it will most likely change the
> specificity. And that in turn may change which selector applies to a
> given element.

Yes, it is meant to change the specificity, but only so much that for
the concrete cases the sets of selected elements stay the same.

I don't claim that this is incredibly useful and I wouldn't want to
apply such a function blindly. However, it could be helpful to identify
selectors that are just too complicated.

Another interesting tool would be one where I can visually select a set
of nodes and get a maximally general selector that picks out just these
nodes.

Michael

--
Michael Schuerig                            This is not a false alarm
mailto:michael@schuerig.de                         This is not a test
http://www.schuerig.de/michael/                      --Rush, Red Tide