What is CSS?

Full-Form of CSS is Cascading Style Sheets. CSS is an integral component of any website from margins and padding between elements to header font size colors and everything in between. It gives the substance of a website's content that much-needed style to be rendered under end-users browsers in a way that’s easier for the eye to navigate and increase functionally. CSS is responsible for style. It governs the style by making sure how elements look like on a certain web page, for example, their colors, the fonts that are in there it also helps in the elements’ positioning and also in animation. 

Why is CSS Called Cascading Style Sheets?

It is mostly because CSS has three manners in which it Cascades the first is through elements so suppose one had written some CSS and he had attached it to a class called boxes and he had attached the styling of color equals blue so this will turn every element on the HTML file with the class boxes into blue now. 

Importance of CSS:

1. Faster Website Speed:

An efficient website should have a faster load time. In current times, it should take less than a couple of seconds for a website to load. That’s why companies want CSS to give a better website experience.

2. Less Maintenance:

CSS is very easy to maintain in a little time. If anyone wants to improve the webpage code then he can do this by just changing a single line of code. 

3. Consistent Design

 Consistency in design is required to make a website elegant and user-friendly. With the help of CSS, developers can apply consistently the style elements across several web pages.

4. Better Device Compatibility

Nowadays a website can be opened from many types of devices such as PC, Laptop, Mobile, Tablet. CSS has better device compatibility and helps to do the task smoothly.

5. Changing the Design Elements:

 With the help of CSS, one can change the position of an HTML tag. CSS helps to place the elements and also can put some animations anywhere on the website.

Limitations of CSS:

You should know that there are some limitations of CSS because then only you can take care of them while designing your website.

1. Hard to Understand: 

It happens mostly to beginners. Sometimes it can get confusing to them while learning CSS because CSS has many levels such as CSS2, CSS3, etc.

2. Cross-Browser Issues:

After changing the CSS codes one should check if all changes are implanted properly to his website among all the browsers because all the browsers work differently.

3. Security Concerns:

In today’s world, security is the main concern but in this case, CSS is not up to the mark. Because CSS has limited security.

4. More Work for Developers:

As these CSS changes should be checked among all the browsers, the developers have to test all of the browsers. So this increases their workload.

What is CSS Minification?

In CSS minification the CSS code of one website becomes small and compact. In this process, pointless or unnecessary characters are removed from the source code without changing the functionality of the source code. CSS minification implies the removal of white spaces, line breaks, comments, and, block delimiters. After the CSS minification, the name of the minified files ends with the ‘.min.css’ extension. Mainly it should be done after compilation of the code and before the implementation of the code.

During writing the code one developer uses white spaces, breaks, and comments which make it easier to understand to the other developers. But these characters are not useful for a website to function. If we delete or remove those characters then it will not affect the functionality of the website. In CSS minification this process is done.

Why is CSS Minification Advantageous?

• CSS minification reduces the size of the code file and makes it lighter.

• As the size of the code file is less, It will take less time to download which will increase website load speed.

• It helps to improve a website's SEO rank. Because more website loading speed means better user experience which helps to improve SEO rank.

• One can minify multiple Javascript and CSS files and make one reduce HTTP requests. 

Disadvantages of CSS Minification:

• Developers need CSS translation maps to discover whether the issues in minified CSS come from the source code. Even with a CSS map, it can be tricky to relate an unintended property to the source code if you inspect the element in a developer tool. The same problem can be found with numerous CSS-like source languages, including SCSS.

• Minimization is not very useful for smaller projects, however, since their files tend to be smaller. Consider 2KB of text. Could it be compressed? Most files have this problem, which is a possible downside of minification. It causes a lot of trouble for developers working on smaller projects.

Tools To Minify Plugins CSS:

CSSnano:

With CSSnano, you have two options, one that simplifies it and one that aggressively rewrites your code and removes whitespace.

This tool condenses white space in addition to removing unneeded colors, removing unwanted comments, destroying overridden at-rules, normalizing Unicode-range descriptions, including gradient parameters, and many other things.

CSSO:

CSSO minifies your CSS by eliminating unnecessary elements like white space, replacing short forms with shorter ones, and reorganizing your CSS by merging declarations, rulesets, and other categories.

Future releases will feature debugging options as well.

UNCSS:

Since UNCSS removes unused CSS from stylesheets, it is a unique minification tool.

If you want to achieve the best results, you could use UNCSS, then run your CSS and JavaScript code through other minification tools. Before you use any tool, be sure to test its compatibility so you won't encounter any errors.

It's a wildly popular option with over 660,000 active installs and is continually updated for reliability, security, and stability.

Example of CSS Minification:

Before minification:

/* Applies to the entire body of the HTML document (except where overridden by more specific

selectors). */

body {

  margin: 25px;

  background-color: rgb(240,240,240);

  font-family: arial, sans-serif;

  font-size: 14px;

}

/* Applies to all

...