A quick rebuttal for CSS Lint

Admission: I worked at Yahoo. I did not work with Nicole, or Nicholas but I am a fan their work. CSS Lint is an opinionated tool. It’s meant to be strict. Any lint, or style checker that isn’t strict isn’t doing you a favor. The whole point of a style checker is to be strict. Now, unlike other languages CSS doesn’t have a central leadership. I think a ton of CSS partitioners who might not know who Eric Meyer is, or have never even used a CSS reset before. If you use a language like python, you might have run across the PEP8. It’s python’s officially adopted style guide. If you don’t happen to program at all, and only end up using CSS as a tool to design with you might have never been exposed to such a style guide. If that is the case then CSS lint could be a bit shocking. When I read CSS Lint is harmful, the first thing that popped into my head was I felt like this person may not be an experienced programmer. When there is such vitriol levied against a project like CSS Link I wonder if it might be a bunch of people who aren’t programmers. I would like to know if a lot of programmers out there who really dislike CSS Lint. This is the biggest reason I felt the author wasn’t a programmer. > “And lastly: Performance is a browser level issue, it is not something > for HTML/CSS authors to fix or work around. As long as we are > authoring valid and sensible HTML and CSS, we should not need to > resort to such ridiculous rules simply to enhance the speed at which a > given page renders.”

If you think that its okay to pass the buck on performance then the author is completely right about CSS Lint. On the other hand, if you are looking for ways to write performance oriented code, because you want your pages to be faster, large company or not, then CSS Lint is a great starting place. No one said it was the last word. For more discussion checkout the HN thread.