Moan about stylesheets within Actinic

[skinnybloke]

I am using the silver theme for a site. When I right click on a class like "silver-header" and then click on "Look up in Stylesheet" it opens up the main stylesheet

It cannot find this style though because it exists in the layout library in a layout named "Styles for Silver Theme".

Why does it not open the stylesheet in which it exists?

So, I have to go trudging through the library to find what I want. It is things like this that makes developing in Actinic so tedious - taking about 5 clciks for something I should be able to do in one.

[Duncan Rounding]

You could move the css fro the relevant theme file to the main actinic.css file then all lookups will work. Else you can manage your css outside of Actinic in your own css editor.

[leehack]

I'd agree with this, a badly organised area IMO which could be vastly improved. With the focus on page loading times at the moment, i think it is also really key to slim what is loaded within a stylesheet. There is so much unused code loaded, it's simply not good and sadly something most people won't really be aware of.

Years and years ago, we asked for a stylesheet per theme, containing just the styles used by that theme. This would of course mean that there would be styles that are used across all themes duplicated, so to combat that, you do the global styles via a selector with a layout, thus providing the central place to change all sheets at once still and then just add the theme specific classes.

They seem to have gone the other way, some individual styles in the main sheet plus some selectors and a huge stylesheet to boot. In v9 i can remove around 1000 lines from the css and site still looks the same, just by correctly doing the css and removing anything not needed/used. That has to point to this area needing some focus, i fear that it will never be important enough though as other areas will need the time.

[jont]

I reported this as a bug in v9 - makes the work flow less than harmonious when developing sites.

[pinbrook]

With the focus on page loading times at the moment, i think it is also really key to slim what is loaded within a stylesheet. There is so much unused code loaded, it's simply not good and sadly something most people won't really be aware of.

This is a timebomb just waiting to go off, the same goes for js. I've spent some time over the past few days getting my head around Google Page Speed and its requirements esp htaccess, its not pretty!

[jont]

First thing I do is strip out additional crud. Surely these could be added as separate links in the theme outer layout rather than the blitzkrieg approach at the moment.

[pinbrook]

I've run some very unscientific tests using the google page speed test within firebug and Yslow. Most Actinic sites I tested currently come out as 75/100 which isnt very good as you need to aim for over 90- 95%

Yslow gives a site with 75/100 a grade D.

[maroni35]

I have to agree with you all and it is a concern but unless you are working with CSS all the time then this is a hard job for an "average" user. I had hoped the new themes in V10 were stripped down CSS and less weighty since the Google speed issue was widely known. your comments suggest otherwise

Given this is not the case and some of you obviously do a lot of design are there any sections of code that we can get rid of without fear. You speak of 1000 lines of code!! Any insights? This might then lead Actinic to identify those areas which really are bloated and prompt them to strip them out of the vanilla product more quickly.
David

[brucet]

Thanks for the comments, I will take those on board and see what we can do in a future release.

[completerookie]

I use Dust-Me Selectors

you can kick off the utilitiy, and then load a web page, it will then tell you which css selectors have been used in that page. You then have that info saved, and when you load the next page, it adds the new selectors into the same list

You can also Spider the website concerned, and it will look at all the pages, and collect together the selectors used

as a fast method of deciding what is *rap and whats not,its a darned good start

[Duncan Rounding]

I also use dust-me, very useful to weed out some rubbish.

[jont]

the tech_ classes can often be deleted without a second thought and occupy a mass of lines in the standard actinic.css

[maroni35]

Thanks guys, downloaded Dust Me and straight off I can see just how much redundancy there is in there. Will have to do major trawl I think.

Have you come across though/ or does Bruce have a list of, selectors which should not be removed even though they appear to be unused or not needed. Ie, they actually format the shopping cart area but Dust me doesn't deal with that very well, or Actinic are going to be implementing something later using certain selectors which are under utilised at the moment

[jont]

Always take automated results with a pinch of salt - always best to check everything manually and copy and save the full contents into a text file for reinstating should you remove something later needed.

I doubt there is a definitive list of what classes are used for each of the themes as this is half of the problem in the first place.

[leehack]

I doubt there is a definitive list of what classes are used for each of the themes as this is half of the problem in the first place.

Perfect summary IMO, just a bad area that keeps having bad piled on top of it.