From: Andrew Stewart <boss@...>
Date: 2007-02-07T23:48:19+09:00
Subject: Re: ruby CSS parser



>> Anyone know of a decent ruby CSS parser?
>
> This is the opposite of what you are looking for, but with the  
> upcoming IOWA 1.0 release I have a Ruby CSS DSL -- write CSS with  
> Ruby using a syntax that's about as close as I could get it to  
> actual CSS.  It supports everything Ruby does, so variables work as  
> does nesting of selectors into other selectors, and storing a  
> selector into a variable that can be refered to later.  It also  
> provides a smart caching feature so that if, for instance, one  
> customizes the generated CSS according to a cookie setting, it can  
> cache that generated CSS and reuse it without having to execute all  
> of the DSL code for every request.
>
> The goals are to provide much DRYer CSS using Ruby that looks a lot  
> like CSS, with easy support for dynamic CSS generation, all covered  
> under the syntax checking of the Ruby parser (which should help one  
> catch simple errors).  And because it's all Ruby code, it's easy to  
> write tests to validate dynamically generated CSS.

This sounds similar to my css_dryer plugin for Rails which allows one  
to nest selectors and use variables:

http://blog.airbladesoftware.com/2006/12/11/cssdryer-dry-up-your-css

In the code I have to parse DRY CSS stylesheets as input.  At the  
time I thought I could either build a proper, robust parser or get by  
with regular expressions and a home-made state machine.  Not having  
any experience building parsers, I went with the latter approach.  It  
works well but would I think be tricky to extend!

Regards,
Andy Stewart


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