Re: proposal: css compression via aliasing specification

On 12/09/13 16:38, Joey Bradshaw wrote:
>
> I'd like to propose a fairly simple compression specification for CSS. 
> Statistics show that the majority of users to any site will have an 
> empty cache calling for a full download of assets like CSS. With the 
> proliferation of vendor specific prefixes along with the new CSS 
> attributes it is very easy to reach large file sizes (100+KB) causing 
> an unnecessary bite into bandwidth especially for "smart" hand held 
> devices. GZip compression and white-space removal goes a long way to 
> reduce CSS file size but a specification for further size reduction 
> like below would cut sizes down dramatically.
>
> The proposal is simply to compress CSS properties and their values 
> through aliasing.
>
>
Is this not what GZIP effectively does in any case? <plug>As someone 
who's written a CSS minifier 
(https://github.com/barryvan/CSSMin/)</plug>, I'd be interested to see 
what sort of reductions this approach would give over just gzipping the 
file.

To be honest, this sort of sounds like CSS variable (simple 
substitution) on the properties, not just the values. I don't think that 
that's allowed in variables at present (of course, I may be mistaken), 
but if it were, you might be able to get reasonable results with a 
preprocessor that intelligently replaced properties that occur more than 
x times with a variable. You would, of course, have the overhead of 
having to encode the mapping in the file itself (like gzip), but on a 
large CSS file, the effect of that would probably be negligible.

-- 
Barry van Oudtshoorn
www.barryvan.com.au