Skip to content

Commit

Permalink
Update Readme
Browse files Browse the repository at this point in the history
- Table of content
- What is purgecss?
- Differences with
  • Loading branch information
Ffloriel committed Jul 16, 2017
1 parent 40cc948 commit 83b27b3
Showing 1 changed file with 54 additions and 0 deletions.
54 changes: 54 additions & 0 deletions README.md
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -9,6 +9,27 @@
</p>


- [What is purgecss?](#what-is-purgecss)
- [Getting started](#getting-started)
- [Usage](#usage)
- [Build plugin](#build-plugin)
- [CLI](#cli)
- [Differences with](#differences-with)
- [Contributing](#contributing)


## What is purgecss?

Purgecss is a tool inspired by Purifycss to remove unused css. Originally thought as the v2 of purifycss,
purgecss has for goal to act in a similar way while correcting the known ploblems of purifycss. If you want
to know more about the differences between purifycss and purgecss, go to the section [Differences with](#differences-with).
When you are building a website, chances are that you are using a css framework. Bootstrap, Materializecss, Foundation are
some of the big css framework that you can include to your website, but you will only use a small set of the framework and
a lot of unused css styles will be included.
This is where Purgecss comes into play. Purgecss takes your content and your css and matches the selectors used in your files
with the one in your content files. It removes every unused selectors from your css files, resulting in smaller, optimize css
files.

### Getting Started

#### Installation
Expand Down Expand Up @@ -104,6 +125,39 @@ Options:
-v, --version Show version number [boolean]
```

### Differences with

#### Purifycss

The biggest flaw with purifycss is its lack of modularity. It is also is biggest benefit, purifycss can work with any files,
not just html or javascript. But purifycss works by looking at all the words in the files and comparing them with the selectors
in the css. Every words is consider a selector, which means that a lot of selectors can be consider used because you have the
selector name in a paragraph or somewhere in your files.

Purgecss fixes this problem by providing the possibility to create an _extractor_, an extractor is a function that takes the content
of a file and extract the list of css selectors in it. It allows a perfect removal of unused css. The extractor can used a parser
that returns an ast and then looks through it to select the css selectors. That is the way `purge-from-html` works.
You can specified which selectors you want to use for each types of files, and so, get the most accurate results.
You can still use the default or the legacy extractor that will act the same way as purifycss.

#### Uncss

As indicated in its Readme, Uncss works the following way:
1. The HTML files are loaded by jsdom and JavaScript is executed.
2. All the stylesheets are parsed by PostCSS.
3. document.querySelector filters out selectors that are not found in the HTML files.
4. The remaining rules are converted back to CSS.

Because of the emulation of html, and the execution of javascript, uncss is effective at removing unused selectors from web application.
But the emulation can have a cost in term of performance and practicality. Uncss works by emulating the html files. To remove unused css
from pug template files, you will need to convert pug to html and then emulate the page inside jsdom and uncss will run `document.querySelector`
on each selectors and step 4.
Uncss by its design is probably the most accurate tool to remove css out of a web application at this moment.

Purgecss does not have an extractor right now for javascript files. But because of its modularity, developers can create an extractor for specific
framework (vue, react, aurelia) and files (pug, ejs) and get the most accurate result without the need of emulation.


## Contributing

Please read [CONTRIBUTING.md](./.github/CONTRIBUTING.md) for details on our code of conduct, and the process for submitting pull requests to us.
Expand Down

0 comments on commit 83b27b3

Please sign in to comment.