How Modern CSS Quietly Made Most Frameworks Optional
There was a good, honest reason developers reached for CSS frameworks for the better part of a decade. Plain CSS, for all its ubiquity, genuinely could not do…
Open source · Node.js
StyleStats parses any HTML or CSS document and produces a small set of metrics — selectors, colors, font sizes, cohesion, !important usage — that act as an early warning system for stylesheet complexity.
Sample reports we keep on file — pick one to see the metrics.
Count selectors, unique colors, font sizes, and float properties — the signals that drift first.
Average and lowest cohesion scores reveal selectors that try to do too much at once.
!important driftSpot specificity wars before they become impossible to untangle.
Articles on CSS, design systems, and front-end craft.
There was a good, honest reason developers reached for CSS frameworks for the better part of a decade. Plain CSS, for all its ubiquity, genuinely could not do…
Every ambitious web interface faces the same slow tragedy. It launches lean and fast. Then features are added, a library here, a widget there, another tracking…
Almost every mature project reaches the same uncomfortable moment. Someone finally looks at the size of the CSS being shipped to visitors and is quietly horrif…
For two decades, responsive web design rested on a single technique: the media query. It was the tool that let websites adapt to different screen sizes, and it…
Every stylesheet accumulates ghosts. Rules written for a component that no longer exists, overrides for a layout that was redesigned two years ago, colours def…
Every stylesheet starts clean. The colours are consistent, the spacing is deliberate, the type scale makes sense. Then the project grows, contributors come and…