This is just a status update on my CSS Minify project, I will make more updates as I progress through the project. It’s basically a journal of my thoughts and design process, so if anything strikes you please do comment with some feedback.
So I started working on a way to minify my CSS files. I know (or well I found out, just after I started working on my own project) that there’s a well written and very functional CSSTidy which does exactly what I want to do. I will anyhow still continue my own project, mostly for the learning process, but also because it’s been a long time since I’ve had a project of my own and I miss that.
My initial thought was to parse the CSS using regular expressions, but the lexical approach CSSTidy uses caught my eye.
I’ve decided to start out parsing with the regular expressions. I will eventually try to copycat the CSSTidy way, just to get a better understanding of lexical analysis, and having CSSTidy as a result sheet.
So far I’ve made the parser, and it seems to work on proper CSS I will need to test it up against some messy CSS.
I had my CSSParser class, with a $selectors array holding all the selectors (my CSSSelector classes). The CSSSelector class had a similar $properties array, holding all the properties (CSSProperties class) for the selector.
This seemed a bit overkill, the arrays were both using a key being the selector/property name and a value being the class, the class it self just being a class with a value property. So I will remove the 2(selector and property) classes, and just use a simpler array structure.
I do however still like the idea of having the selector and property classes, it fits nicely into the whole CSS principal. I’ve been planing to use them when it comes to outputting the CSS again, but in that case why not just use them to start with … I’m torn.
Thank you, I have benefited greatly
Do not stop :)