Diagnostic Styling Reloaded

Published on August 1, 2009 (↻ February 5, 2024), filed under (RSS feed for all categories).

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development. And speaking of which, here’s a short treatise just about managing the quality of websites: The Little Book of Website Quality Control (updated).

Eric cultivated the concept of “diagnostic styling,” meaning using CSS to track down problems within HTML documents. I’ve been working with diagnostic style sheets for general quality assurance or to uncover specific semantics or maintainability problems mostly through bookmarklets. One of these bookmarklet style sheets is now publicly available on Google Project Hosting GitHub:

QA Style Sheet.

I wrote this style sheet a couple of months ago for Google, not necessarily following specific needs but to provide an additional quality-related tool. To follow many other—though obviously much more impactful—examples of Google sharing code, I decided to make that QA style sheet public, too, on Google Project Hosting GitHub so as to play with that as well. This should explain both hosting and licensing of this rather small project.

Some things on the QA Style Sheet’s site are still work in progress. Above all I couldn’t directly link a bookmarklet of the style sheet, which is the most useful way of working with it (that bookmarklet link is available on a separate page). There are many ways to inform me about issues though, be it on the project site or in this place. While I hope it’s not difficult to understand what the style sheet does and why, I hope to slowly extend the site’s documentation.

Was this useful or interesting? Share (toot) this post, become a one-time nano-sponsor, or support my work by learning with my ebooks.

About Me

Jens Oliver Meiert, on November 9, 2024.

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m a contributor to several web standards, and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development (and engineering management), but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (Please be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)

Comments (Closed)

  1. On August 1, 2009, 14:43 CEST, Neovov said:

    This is freakin’ excelent ! Thanks a lot, I’m gonna over-use it !

  2. On August 1, 2009, 21:55 CEST, Vladimir said:

    Useful. Thank you for sharing.
    I was thinking of building something similar, but with powerful tools like Firebug doesn’t make much sense now. It will be cool to make bookmarklet for IE6 who will simulate the DIV behavior.

  3. On August 4, 2009, 16:22 CEST, Jens Oliver Meiert said:

    Thanks, Nicolas, Vladimir (I’ve noticed that you’re experimenting a bit with bookmarklets, too).