It’s never been easier to learn how to build and design websites. With an endless number of excellent websites and books at our disposal for learning these new skills with ease, you’d think it’s a real breeze to pick up the knowledge required to take on web design and development as a hobby or occupation. But we can do better.
When developing a large website, most of us would compress our CSS files before deploying a live site. And that’s just fine — saving bytes helps make our users happier, our websites leaner, and our bandwidth bills smaller. But the wannabe developers of tomorrow are let down — what we could teach them by way of comments in our CSS, or best practices for structuring and organising our CSS, is thrown out the window as soon as we compress. No comments. No clues. No learning.
It’s pretty tough starting out as a designer/developer. You must remember those days of sitting on support forums, relentlessly refreshing and waiting for an answer to “How does website x do this with CSS?” Tough times, no doubt.
So be a helpful developer. Alongside your style.min.css, consider an uncompressed style.max.css, or a comment at the top of your CSS file pointing our developer-in-the-making to an unminified version of the styles.
Thank you.
I’ve addressed some misunderstandings and concerns surrounding Max CSS in a blog post.