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Update: You can now download the Textmate macro file rather than recording your own (skip to the download »).

There has been plenty of discussion about the pros and cons of single-line style sheets, and I’ve been including them as an option when teaching CSS management and organization in my Web Design World presentations in Chicago, Seattle, and later this year in Las Vegas (at WebBuilder) and Boston.

It’s a matter of preference

As a fellow Sidebar–ian (Sidebarbarian?) Steve has been trying to convince me to use the single-line approach for a while of course, and Bryan and Jon have also become fans of this formatting style for their own work. Although they are enamored with it, I haven’t taken to it yet, still preferring to write my style sheets using the “normal” indented formatting most of us are used to.

Now, before anyone gets their knickers in a twist about why they love, hate, “can’t live without” or “will die before they try” single-line formatting, let’s just take a step back and remember one thing: it isn’t anything special, just an alternate formatting style that doesn’t affect the way the browser interprets the style sheet one iota. It’s a personal preference—remember that before jumping on or off this particular bandwagon.

Always keep your options open

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, let’s talk practicality: there are indeed benefits to be had when using single-line CSS formatting—for example, I find it can make a difference after a project has been completed, at which point I’m usually more interested in visually scanning a style sheet for the selectors first, and then for a particular property I’m interested in editing. This is where I’ve found single-line formatting can come in handy.

But my editor already does that!

This is the point where some people will start going on about how you could just use Textmate’s “foldings” feature to get the same visual result (without altering your file), or how CSS Edit has a handy list of all the selectors in a column on the left side of its window, or that you could always use your editor’s “find” command and search for the selector you want to edit. Yet while those are all perfectly logical, sane suggestions, they don’t account for flexibility and choice.

Just another way of doing things

Much like Jon Hicks with his harem of web browsers, I tend to be a bit of a “text editor polygamist”, bouncing from Textmate to CSS Edit to Coda to BBEdit to Transmit’s text editor and a host of CLI editors, mostly depending on my mood (though sometimes contextual if I’m at a computer that doesn’t have a particular application—a WindowsXP box with nothing but Notepad, for instance). It’s the times when I’m using an editor that doesn’t have “foldings” or pretty columns of selectors that I start to appreciate single-line CSS when making quick edits, so I’ve started converting style sheets to a “simple” single-line format (without the left-aligned tab blocks to start each rule’s properties) once they are ready to go live.

Patterns fit for a kilt

Editors like Textmate and BBEdit have built-in commands for formatting (the standard, multi-line approach) or compressing (the entire style sheet on one line, ostensibly to reduce file size by stripping white space) CSS, but no way to convert to single-line formatting and Textmate’s “Format CSS Compressed” bundle can format your stylesheet to a single line per-rule, though it’s all squished together, making it difficult to scan due to a lack of whitespace. Converting a style sheet by hand every time would be much too time-consuming to bother with, but that’s where regular expressions come to the rescue.

In Textmate, you can record a macro using each of these regex patterns as a separate step (I’m sure other editors have a similar feature, so please feel free to post details in the comments below). This allowed me to create a “Format CSS Single-line” command, complete with a keyboard shortcut, which enables an easy switch between multi– and single-line formatting.

Unfortunately, as of this writing Textmate macros cannot be exported and shared For those using Textmate, getting the macro is a simple matter of downloading, expanding and double-clicking this file:

• Download the “Format CSS Single-line” Textmate macro » (ZIP, 1KB)

While similar to “Format CSS Compressed”, this macro retains a single blank line where your original contained two or more blank lines (helpful if you group your rules), and adds whitespace that matches my standard formatting preferences (which I find makes it easier to scan quickly). To switch between each formatting style, just run each command in turn (via the Bundles menu or the keyboard shortcuts).

However, that wouldn’t be much use to everyone who doesn’t use Textmate, so here are the respective groups of regex I used for the conversion:

\n{3,}
\n\n
 
[ \t]+
 
(?m)([;:])\s+
$1
 
\s*}
 }
 
\s*{\s*
 {
 
[ \t]*,[ \t]*
,
 
@import(.*?);
@import$1;\n\n

What’s missing

In Textmate and BBEdit I can return to multi-line formatting with a single command, but that might not be as simple in other editors. What I’d love to see is a pair of shell scripts that convert from multi– to single-line and back, and possibly a web-based processor that does the same (paste your style sheet into a textarea, select your formatting, hit “process” and the script produces the result). If anyone would like to take on those tasks, I’ll happily update this post to link to the products of your labor.

And in the end…

If you’ve never tried single-line formatting, this makes it easy to experiment without committing yourself (and I do recommend giving it a try—you may be surprised once you’ve worked with it a few times).

Ultimately, because I can return to multi-line with a single command my primary text editor should I ever feel like it, automating the switch from multi– to single-line is a convenient way to get the benefits of single-line formatting without backing myself or my clients into a formatting corner.

Update: The original edit of this post and demo file didn’t quite work in IE6/7 (ok, didn’t work at all, really). That’s what you get when you rush and/or don’t care about certain browsers See the comments for my quick explanation of the fix (the demo now works in FF2/3, Safari 2/3, Opera 9, and IE6/7).

Ok, so the name won’t win any awards, but let’s be honest: neither will this mini-tutorial, or the idea itself (nothing groundbreaking here, move along…). But after throwing together a quick little (you guessed it) hover/tab/thingy for my previous article, I thought I was fun enough to share, in case you find a need for it someday.

The usual suspects

The “thingy” in question is just a simple unordered list, with each list item containing an anchor and an image—we want the images in this case because I want them to display in my RSS feed and for anyone who can’t (or chooses not to) view the styled version of this site.

Note: Feel free to reference images in the stylesheet rather than inline if that suits your purposes. Because I know you need permission, don’t you…

If you were too lazy to click the link to my previous article above (and who could blame you, really), here’s a quick demo page.

Moving right along…

First, the markup (with URLs truncated to save trees):

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Simple, uncluttered, uncomplicated. Just how I know you like it.

Next, the CSS—not quite as short as the markup, but that’s how the story often goes:

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ul#hover-tab-thingy {
  position:relative;
  padding:0;
  width:500px;
  height:498px; }
#hover-tab-thingy li {
  float:left;
  list-style:none; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a {
  float:left;
  padding:9px 21px;
  background-color:#eee;
  color:#999;
  font-size:9px;
  text-align:center;
  text-transform:uppercase;
  border-right:1px solid #fff; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a:hover {
  background-color:#f60;
  color:#fff; }
li#one a,
li#one a:hover {
  background-color:#e5e5e5;
  color:#555; }
#hover-tab-thingy li a img {
  position:absolute;
  left:0;
  top:30px;
  width:500px;
  height:460px;
  clear:left;
  margin-left:-9999px;
  padding:1px;
  border:3px solid #e5e5e5; }
li#one a img,
#hover-tab-thingy li a:hover img {
  margin-left:0; }
li#two a:hover img,
li#three a:hover img {
  border-color:#f60; }

This is all fairly straightforward, so here are the highlights that may help when duplicating this on your own:

1. The entire idea is that you have tabs that are each associated with content (images in this case) which are made visible when the user hovers over the tab. There are more things you could do with this, but that’s your job, grasshopper.
2. The tabs are floated; the content elements (img in this case) clear the floats.
3. The content elements are set to position:absolute, so they can appear in the same location for each tab. To accomplish this, the ul is set to position:relative (in short: an absolutely positioned element will be positioned relative to its nearest positioned ancestor—see Doug Bowman’s great write up for more), and it’s probably a good idea if the dimensions of your ul (the container for your content) have a lot in common with those of your content elements.
4. IE6 has a problem reverting elements that set display:block on :hover to their original state (e.g. display:none). To counter this, use a negative left margin as the default positioning, and then set margin-left:0; on the hover state, which works in all modern browsers.
5. The width and height is specific to my example (the dimensions of the images I used), ditto for the padding on the tabs and the top positioning on the img elements (to push them below the tabs). Bend them to your will.
6. Everyone dies at the end of The Departed. Seriously, everyone. That should be the subtitle of the movie.

Obligatory wrap-up

This may be something that you’ll find use for on a regular basis—one of those tiny snippets of reusable “stuff” that you’ll be glad you don’t have to type every time. Or you’ll never need it because you can’t for the life of you think of any reason why you’d need to reveal some content whilst hovering over a tab (I’m pretty much just painting the sarcasm with a roller at this point…).

Whatever your future may hold, now you have something you might not have had before, and that’s never a bad thing—unless we’re talking about some sort of disease, in which case…