Web Dev Digest Episode 8 Intro ...INTRO MUSIC... Welcome to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup. This is episode number eight, for Friday, July sixth, 2007. I'm your host, Ara Pehlivanian. ...MUSIC INTERLUDE... Hello and welcome the show. The CSS Redundancy Checker Say you're working on a web project and you want to know where the CSS selectors for a particular element are coming from, what would you use? Probably either Firefox's Firebug or DOM Inspector, or maybe the Web Inspector on Safari. Now what if you wanted to know what selectors weren't being used? What would you do then? A lot of projects are either built by a team or grow over time and inevitably end up with redundant CSS selectors in bloated CSS files. We won't get into exactly why this phenomenon occurs except to say that it results in a maintenance nightmare. Sifting through a mammoth CSS file in order to clean it up has traditionally been a very painful, if not impossible task. But not anymore. Thanks to Tom Armitage's CSS Redundancy Checker, those days are long gone. Simply run your beast of a CSS file and any number of HTML documents through the tool and voila! When it's done doing its work, you'll have a nice report that tells you which selectors aren't being used in any of those HTML files. The only catch is, they need to be whole HTML documents, not fragments. So if your site is dynamic, you're best to run a crawler through it in order to grab the final renders of the documents. The script was written on Armitage's morning train ride and is a remarkably small fifty lines of Ruby code that relies on the Hpricot HTML parser to do all of the heavy lifting. The project is hosted on Google Code in case you want to take a peek under the hood, report any issues or maybe even help out. Degradable JavaScript, Ajax and MySQL Alejandro Gervasio has written an article on devarticles dot com called "Making JavaScript Applications Degrade Gracefully with AJAX and MySQL". The article is the last installment in a series that began with "Making JavaScript Applications Degrade Gracefully" where he previously covered how to write JavaScript code that had the ability to fail transparently under certain client-side conditions. In his latest piece he covers how to first fetch database rows using a traditional method, and then displaying additional data using Ajax. Project Zero It seems that even IBM isn't immune to the Web 2.0 craze. Named Project Zero, it's IBM's bid at putting together an environment that allows for the development of "applications that incorporate popular 'Web 2.0' patterns such as user contributed content, ratings, tagging, reputation management, and richer user experiences." The environment includes a scripting runtime for Groovy and PHP. "[The] platform uses REST and ATOM to form the basis of the service invocation model; JSON and XML as the data interchange format; and Ajax as the model for a rich client." It also includes "reusable components such as code snippets, widgets, libraries, templates and pre-built services". The project has drawn some criticism as it isn't open source, but IBM official Jason McGee defended the company's stance by stating that "Project Zero follows a commercial software development effort, in much the same way as other commercial offerings from IBM. [The] fact that Project Zero is based on a number of open source technologies and that it represents such a significant investment on top of these technologies speaks to IBM's commitment [to open source]." Paul Boag signs book deal Paul Boag of boagworld dot com has announced on his blog that he will be throwing his hat into the authors' ring. Boag who is already well known for his weekly podcast on boagworld.com as well as the  host of the recently started .net magazine podcast, has signed a deal with Manning Publications to write a book that will "be aimed at website owners and tell them what they need to know in order to run a successful website." This will be the first book for Boag who is also a founding partner of the UK based web design firm Headscape. Apple working on Flash support for iPhone And finally, it turns out that Apple does plan on rolling out support for Flash on the iPhone after all. Robert Scoble posted the news today on his blog, and promises more details soon as he'll be spending some time with Adobe executives over the next couple of days. Outtro ... OUTTRO MUSIC FADE IN ... You've been listening to the Web Dev Digest, your daily web development news roundup. This was episode number eight, for Thursday, July sixth, 2007. I'm Ara Pehlivanian. Show notes with links to the news covered in this episode can be found on web dev digest dot net.