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Comment by PhrosTT | Hacker News Reader

I've been using inline everything since templates (ejs) came into existence. Once you have templates you're only editing one location anyway.

The biggest problem with CSS is it's really easy to add, and close to impossible to delete (detecting potential repercussions is hard).

Sure there's performance issues, but most of the time your developer/maintenance time is worth the the extra bytes.

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It's not actually that terrible, but then again it depends on what you're building I suppose.

Where I work, I made a fairly robust image diffing utility that runs using Selenium/WebDriver on all browsers that we support. Combined with a robust test suite of many different scenarios, we can make changes to our stylesheets with a pretty high amount of confidence that if anything changed, it'll fail the build.

That sounds like a lotta work, but that's a good thing to have when the appearance is an important part of what you are doing. (cost-benefit, risk management and all that)

Sounds like an opportunity for IDE makers. Add plugins to track CSS/HTML/templating, "where used" tools, and refactoring to push frequently repeated styles up into a main CSS file, or rarely used styles down into the few elements using it.

Hopefully, there are few enough classes and styles injected from a long js code chain that you can manually check the things the IDE misses. JetBrains IDEs are surprisingly good at finding things connected via common libraries in code, so I'm hopeful that IDE makers could recognize common patterns in libraries such as React and Angular (e.g. - ng-class)

I doubt IDE's could really do much with it -- adding and removing classes dynamically means it can answer the question "is this used?" but it can never answer the question "is this unused?" Plus there's about 4000 template languages being invented every second, that the IDE would need to not just highlight, but intelligently parse.

But, is that extra development time worth the time your visitor loses whilst page rendering? If it's a significant amount, I would say no.

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