Ruby, a message to you

I try to follow some good guidelines when developing a website. I separate content from style with CSS, for example, by judiciously using class and id attributes for html elements. Of course, I also usually leave the styling until the content has been mostly completed. The problem with that, though, is I end up with many views and many helpers that reference class and id attributes for elements I haven’t styled yet.

So I made CSSes. It searches helpers and views (you’re not putting style information in your controllers or models are you?) for references to html entities, and creates a bare-bones CSS file.

It has a few shortcomings. It doesn’t yet handle link_to* or image_tag or any of the form building methods, just raw referenced html. It’s only Rails 2.0.x friendly so far. It makes just one file, public/stylesheets/application.css, and you can’t control the name. If you use the < character in html attribute values, it will probably make a little noise. It doesn’t have any unit tests.

But! It was sure nice to run after working on a site for a while and finding this waiting for me:

body {}
div {}
div#author_bio {}
div#author_url {}
div#chapbook_exceprt {}
...
div.chapbook_links {}
div.poem_content {}
div.poem_links {}
...
h1 {}
h1#author_name {}
h1#chapbooks_header {}
...

Get it:

sudo gem install csses

Run it:

script/generate css

Any help at all would be greatly appreciated; it’s pretty raw. But I plan on making it more robust and more fun.

Update!: We’ve got tests, automatic anchor tag pseudo-classes, and basic link_to* and image_tag support (figuring out how to handle class and id attributes in rails helpers is a little trickier than I guessed at first). AND: it’s a gem now.