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.

Toot or tweet about this?

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.

If you have a question or suggestion about what I write, please leave a comment (if available) or a message. Thank you!

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?