Plurrrr

Auditing CSS is not a common task in a developer’s everyday life, but sometimes you just have to do it. Maybe it’s part of a performance review to identify critical CSS and reduce unused selectors. Perhaps is part of effort to improve accessibility where all the colors used in the codebase evaluated for contrast. It might even be to enforce consistency!

Hello! Over the last few days I made a little tool called dnspeep that lets you see what DNS queries your computer is making, and what responses it’s getting. It’s about 250 lines of Rust right now.

I’ll talk about how you can try it, what it’s for, why I made it, and some problems I ran into while writing it.

Combined with the complexity of modern websites and the way browsers process CSS, even a moderate amount of CSS can become a bottleneck for people who deal with constrained devices, network latency, bandwidth, or data limits. Because performance is a vital part of the user experience, it’s essential to make sure you deliver a consistent, high-quality experience across devices of all shapes and sizes and that requires optimising your CSS too.

This post will cover what kinds of performance issues CSS can cause and best practices for crafting CSS that doesn’t get in people’s way.