CleanCSS

CleanCSS is a simple pythonic language for CSS inspired by CleverCSS but simpler and with less obstrusive features.

This is a PHP port of the original library developed for python.

Why

I really liked the idea behind CleverCSS but when used in production I realized that I was trying to get away from its parser by escaping strings and unsupported CSS properties way too often. Using vendor prefixes like -webkit-gradient and values such as rgba resulted in a messy CSS, so I decided to write my own parser for a similar syntax without all the complex features that I did not use anyway and it now works fine for me in REAL modern websites.

Syntax examples

I'm going to keep the CleverCSS examples where possible since the syntax is really similar.

A small example below. Note the indentation based syntax and how you can nest rules:

#header, #footer:
    margin: 0
    padding: 0
    font->
        family: Verdana, sans-serif
        size: .9em

    li:
        padding: 0.4em
        margin: 0.8em 0 0.8em

        a:
            color: black

            &:hover:
                color: red

        h3:
            font-size: 1.2em
        p:
            padding: 0.3em
        p.meta:
            text-align: right
            color: #ddd

Of course you can do the very same in CSS, but because of its flat nature the code would look more verbose. The following piece of code is the CleanCSS output of the above file:

#header, #footer {
    margin: 0;
    padding: 0;
    font-family: Verdana, sans-serif
    font-size: .9em
}

#header li,
#footer li {
    padding: 0.4em;
    margin: 0.8em 0 0.8em;
}

#header li a,
#footer li a {
    color: black;
}

#header li a:hover,
#footer li a:hover {
    color: red;
}

#header li h3,
#footer li h3 {
    font-size: 1.2em;
}

#header li p,
#footer li p {
    padding: 0.3em;
}

#header li p.meta,
#footer li p.meta {
    text-align: right;
    color: #dddddd;
}

Library usage

Simply call CleanCSS::convert($FILENAME); after including the library file. You probably should specify a text/css content-type.

Example:

require_once('cleancss.php');
header('Content-Type: text/css');
echo CleanCSS::convert('file.ccss');

Which is equivalent to:

require_once('cleancss.php');
CleanCSS::output('file.ccss');

LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2010 Massimiliano Torromeo

CleanCSS is free software released under the terms of the BSD license.

See the LICENSE file provided with the source distribution for full details.

Contacts

• Massimiliano Torromeo <massimiliano.torromeo@gmail.com>