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Show HN: Excssive, drag and drop CSS compressor

19 points by zachwill 15y ago

jasonkester 15y ago
Pretty, impressive, and all that. But realistically isn't all this effort for nothing? If you're doing a project that needs to have scripts and css minified, the last thing you'd want to do is to introduce a manual drag/drop/arrange/copy/paste step into your build and deploy process. You'll have a command line tool that you incorporate into your automated build and that will be the last you think of it. I suspect this will get used in the critical path of actual projects about as often as jsbeautifier.org does for javascript. As in, pretty much never.
- zachwill 15y ago
  Completely agree that a commandline tool is optimal — the site is actually built off of the clean-css commandline minifier. The real world use case is currently one of my developer friends is using the Foundation framework by Zurb (which comes with a bunch of separate CSS files, so you can pick and choose), and instead of having 5-6 <link> elements (extraneous HTTP requests are bad), those can all be packaged up in one minifed CSS file. Using that as a vanilla reset, he can link to another CSS file with his modifications and changes — and never has to interact with the commandline clean-css or YUI Compressor utility. It's just drag and drop with the same results.
lobster_johnson 15y ago
Has to be a command-line tool in order to integrate into the asset pipeline of a project; you want to do this automatically at deploy/release time. Take a look at tools like Jammit and Juicer to figure out how to integrate your code into their workflow.
- zachwill 15y ago
  I definitely agree that commandline is the right way to go (the site is actually built using the Node.js clean-css script). I built the site with a friend in mind (and those who never really interact with their terminal).
ckr 15y ago
OT: What's the song in the video?
- zachwill 15y ago
  Haha, it's "Midnight City" by M83: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDyonn3mQj8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDyonn3mQj8

19 points by zachwill 15y ago

Pretty, impressive, and all that. But realistically isn't all this effort for nothing? If you're doing a project that needs to have scripts and css minified, the last thing you'd want to do is to introduce a manual drag/drop/arrange/copy/paste step into your build and deploy process. You'll have a command line tool that you incorporate into your automated build and that will be the last you think of it. I suspect this will get used in the critical path of actual projects about as often as jsbeautifier.org does for javascript. As in, pretty much never.

zachwill 15y ago
Completely agree that a commandline tool is optimal — the site is actually built off of the clean-css commandline minifier. The real world use case is currently one of my developer friends is using the Foundation framework by Zurb (which comes with a bunch of separate CSS files, so you can pick and choose), and instead of having 5-6 <link> elements (extraneous HTTP requests are bad), those can all be packaged up in one minifed CSS file. Using that as a vanilla reset, he can link to another CSS file with his modifications and changes — and never has to interact with the commandline clean-css or YUI Compressor utility. It's just drag and drop with the same results.

lobster_johnson 15y ago

Has to be a command-line tool in order to integrate into the asset pipeline of a project; you want to do this automatically at deploy/release time. Take a look at tools like Jammit and Juicer to figure out how to integrate your code into their workflow.

zachwill 15y ago
I definitely agree that commandline is the right way to go (the site is actually built using the Node.js clean-css script). I built the site with a friend in mind (and those who never really interact with their terminal).

ckr 15y ago

OT: What's the song in the video?

zachwill 15y ago
Haha, it's "Midnight City" by M83: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDyonn3mQj8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDyonn3mQj8