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by saint-loup 1612 days ago
From the Parcel CSS page : it does 'tree shaking', which automatically eliminates unused code. Not details on what that implies, though. Tools like PurgeCSS (used by Tailwind pre-v3) comb through the HTML for matching selectors, but I'm not sure if Parcel does the same thing.

Anyway, as others comments said, these kind of tools nowadays are more 'transformers' than mere 'minifiers'.
1 comments
zelphirkalt 1612 days ago
That's really nice, but to me still sounds like the wrong way to go. Instead of reducing something that is too much, that which is too much should not have been added in the first place. We are doing work here, removing, what we have previously added.

I wonder how much ineffective styling still remains after "tree shaking". I guess the fancy tree shaking is out of luck, if we add unnecessary styling to elements, which are indeed used. It seems a really hard problem to solve automatically, to transform CSS in a way, that takes care of redundancies and unnecessary styling, while still maintaining the readability, which well crafted CSS can have.

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dmitriid 1612 days ago
> that which is too much should not have been added in the first place.

The problem is, with CSS you don't know if you've added too much. As the project evolves, and code and styles change there's literally no way of knowing if a certain CSS rule is still in use Well, except regexp'ing the whole project looking for matches.

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selcuka 1611 days ago
> regexp'ing the whole project looking for matches

That's basically what these tree-shaking tools do.

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