TSS

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TSS is Twitter Style Sheets or Text Style Sheets, a compressed form of CSS applicable to short bits of text, suitable for storing in very small fields like 512 bytes.

Open source CASSIS implementation: http://xent.com/tss.js

Design

Summary from tss.js:

// TSS decoder / HTML encoder
// Tantek Çelik http://tantek.com/ 2010-150
// decodes:
// {(p:v;)+}?       // whole tweet rule
// (*{(p:v;)+})?    // generic rule for all runs
// (n,n{(p:v;)+})*  // relative offset, length run specific rule

Demo

Live UI with TSS examples: http://xent.com/rtf (requires JS for the "live" part :)

try picking from the presets to see sample "TSS" code, as well as HTML as a result of applying it to sample text. (no need to sign-in to Twitter)

Posts

About TSS:

2010-05-29: https://tantek.com/2010/149/t1/compress-css-declarations-tweet-annotations-tanhf
with @rohitkhare invented a way to compress CSS style declarations: ~10bytes/p:v for tweet stylesheet annotations #tanhf
2015-05-30: https://tantek.com/2010/150/t1/tweet-style-sheet-tss-annotations-rich-tweets-tanhf
demoed Tweet Style Sheet (TSS) annotations / rich tweets w @rohitkhare, scared Paul Graham a little :) #tanhf demonstration at http://knx.to/rtf. TSS decompressor/cascader library: http://knx.to/tss.js - written in CASSIS naturally.
2010-06-02: http://readwrite.com/2010/06/02/tweeting_in_color_from_the_annotations_hackfest/
2010-06-20: Rohit's comment on GigaOM article “Twitter Annotations Are Coming”
[…] I’m looking forward to seeing what the community creates with Annotations. I think of them as akin to Closed Captions on TV, which was our intent with Twitter Style Sheets, http://knx.to/rtf
2017-01-13: http://tantek.com/2017/013/t1/csswg-compression-2010-tss

About the Twitter Annotations Hackfest more broadly:

Official hashtag: #tanhf (tweets)
Twitter Annotations Hackfest wiki

About Twitter Annotations more broadly:

2010-06-20: GigaOM: Twitter Annotations Are Coming — What Do They Mean For Twitter and the Web? Internet Archive because gigaom.com is both js;dr as of 2025 (or earlier) and the new owners broke redirects to old posts like https://gigaom.com/2010/06/20/twitter-annotations-are-coming-what-do-they-mean-for-twitter-and-the-web/
...

Design

Demo

Posts

See Also