I wanted a tool that would analyze a complete web site, and report what CSS selectors and IDs are dead. By dead, I mean one of two things -- either the ID or selector is referenced from the HTML and undefined in the CSS or it is defined in the CSS but never referenced in the HTML.

A search for some CSS finding utilities proved somewhat fruitful. I found a brief survey of related utilities for this finding or cleaning dead CSS, the most promising of which was a Firefox plug-in called Dust-Me Selectors. But I wanted something that could be integrated into an automatic build process, easily invokable from the command line without requiring a browser, so I started thinking about a custom solution.

The problem can be solved as follows:

1. Find all referenced IDs and classes, called R
2. Find all defined IDs and classes, called D
3. Take a difference between the sets so that the list of undefined IDs and classes is (R - D), and the list of unreferenced IDs and classes is (D - R)

I've already had the pleasure of using BeautifulSoup python library to parse all sorts of HTML documents, and I quickly found cssutils to be a very handy CSS parser. In a matter of hours I was able to whip up a basic dead CSS finder in 100 lines of code using these great tools. I named it 7sense, after the movie. To run it, you just need to invoke ./7sense.py <list of files and directories> and the specified files will be parsed as if they were all part of the same webpage. Directories will be walked recursively, with all encountered CSS and HTML files assumed to be part of the web page.

But things are not as simple as I had hoped, and my program has several notable limitations.

1. Due to lack of time, 7sense does not look at what stylesheets are referenced by an HTML page. Instead, you have to tell it explicitly what stylesheets are used by passing them as arguments.
2. 7sense does not properly decipher heirarchical CSS selectors like '#myContainer .aboutBox'. Instead, it splits the selector into whitespace separated tokens, ignoring their structure. I skimped on this feature also due to lack of time.
3. More fundamentally, 7sense is not aware of any Javascript modifications to the DOM. This could be remedied on a case-by-case basis. For example, one could write a parser to seek jQuery.setClass invocations, and extract additional classes from there.

At any rate, here's 7sense so far. Though flawed, it's a useful start. Ideas and code improvements, especially addressing the above limitations are very much appreciated!