Testing Tricks: CSS Bookmarklets

Post from December 29, 2010 (↻ June 10, 2021), filed under (feed).

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development.

A quick tip: If you’re working in a complex development environment that does not allow you to fully test the impact of upcoming style sheet changes, a simple CSS bookmarklet containing all the changes or the new style sheet in its entirety can be a nice way to give other developers a chance to review changes in action before they’re actually live. (That was one sentence.)

Using CSS bookmarklets can be a particularly useful testing complement if you have not thought of or did not yet get to setting up a prototype for your site or framework, and if you can actually ask developers rather than less tech-savvy users to test in order to quickly get to qualified feedback or them to eventually prepare for adjustments on their own end.

Side note: Be cautious around style rules you are about to remove as they will still be in effect on pages to be tested. With a simple CSS bookmarklet you would need to “neutralize” such rules within the bookmarklet, eventually by explicitly setting initial values.

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About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on September 30, 2021.

I’m Jens, and I’m an engineering lead and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead for Google, I’m close to W3C and WHATWG, and I write and review books for O’Reilly. I love trying things, sometimes including philosophy, art, and adventure. Here on meiert.com I share some of my views and experiences.

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Comments (Closed)

  1. On December 29, 2010, 8:06 CET, Greg said:

    Jens,

    Having no familiarity with CSS Bookmarklets, it sounds like this isn’t something I need if I run a development version of my work…

    Or is this a tool that can compliment development environment?

  2. On January 3, 2011, 21:37 CET, Brian said:

    Wouldn’t Greasemonkey be a little more modern way to achieve this?