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Comment by dasil003 | Hacker News Reader

I work on a Rails site with about 5000 lines of CSS. There are spidering tools and other things that you can use to scan for the existence of a class, but I think those tools are often dangerous because in most applications there are tons of pages and/or conditional content that a spider will never see.

So far I haven't found anything more reliable than simple grepping. This can range from completely awesome if your class/id names are unique in the codebase, to painstakingly tedious if you have generic class names that match your controllers, models, libraries and everything else. However given all the places that a CSS name could hang out, it has proven to be the most robust.

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5000 lines of CSS? You really need to re look at how you have used CSS. I can not imagine any web application needing that many lines of CSS.

Actually I know amazingly well what I'm doing with CSS. I've been wrangling CSS since IE4/NS4. The reason we have so much CSS is because the site was not originally designed by a web designer. It was designed page by page by a graphic designer. We have 125 controllers and over 300 templates, plus several dozen static pages. Many of these pages have custom layouts and typography.

The reason we have 5000 lines of well-organized CSS instead of 10000 lines of poorly-organized CSS is thanks to some heavy refactoring that we have done after most of the pages had been built. Don't underestimate the cost of building a unique brand. We can't all get by on 37signals style.

"Don't underestimate the cost of building a unique brand. We can't all get by on 37signals style."

WTH does this mean in this context? Not being snarky; I can't figure it out for the life of me.

If I was building the site from scratch I would build it in such a way to minimize markup as CSS. I would probably do minimal Photoshop mockups and iterate rapidly in HTML/CSS, and the design would be very much driven by efficiency of the markup and CSS.

However in our case we had a graphic designer who had never done anything on the web before. This may seem like an insane way to design a web product, but the result is that we ended up with a brand that was entirely unique on the web, and this gave us a real tangible benefit when it came to attracting our initial userbase and business partnerships.

In the end the same functionality could have been built and reasonably well styled with 1000 lines of CSS, but we purposefully chose to go the longer route for branding purposes.

I work on a giant Rails site that has over well over 5,000 lines of CSS – when you are working on custom promotions, dozens of dynamic pages, and accounting for user generated content the CSS files get long.

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