Reflow Cleaner

Disclaimer: Reflow isn’t intended to be used the way I will layout, and this isn’t an official Adobe thing.  This is just me fooling around with some ideas. 

As a follow up to my post about what you do after you work with Adobe Edge Reflow, I’ve been exploring the source code Reflow creates looking to see what I can do with it. I’ve also been experimenting with Brackets to see if I could use that to deliver some workflow here.  My experiments have yielded the unoriginally named “Brackets Reflow Cleaner.”  It does what it sounds like, it cleans the output you generate with Reflow in Brackets into something approaching that which you would use in a hand coded HTML file. How does it work?

In Reflow, I use the ability to label parts of my design to indicate what I want things to be.  

I label things with element names to output them as elements.

I add a period to the front of a string to mark it as a class.  

From all this I can create an outline that looks like my eventual HTML should look.

Now Reflow doesn’t really care about all this as you can see by the HTML it outputs. It turns them into id’s.

However, I have the HTML. I can run processes on it to convert it to something else.

Now the CSS is a little different.  It is very verbose, full of ids, and crazy percentages. I’m not sure what to do with it.  But I can analyze it and maybe pull out some interesting details from it.

Color

Font

Breakpoints

I can even use the intelligence on the classes I setup in the Reflow file to analyze classes to figure out what was the same about them and create common classes for them.

Here’s a video with a complete demonstration of it. 

I wrapped all of this up in a Brackets Extension so that if you wanted to play with it, you could. It’s Open Source and available on github. 

This is an experiment and a starting place.  I’d love to hear from anybody that give this a try.  Is it usable? Does it help you do anything.  Is this a crazy waste of time?  All opinions welcome.