but it appears at long last via the right googling and the guys at Sitepoint that I’ve found a Firefox plugin that can find the CSS I don’t need any more. Dust-Me Selectors (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5392) promises to take a peak at linked CSS documents and as you browse through a site it will then tick off the styles it finds.

I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world who hates the thought of trawling through old rules that no longer apply in documents handed down to you by previous owners of the site, or as is the case with a few of mine passed across a base framework/layout that has been used in several sites.
You name all your rules carefully, with nicely explanitory names, but after 6 months does
.leftcolumnfirstitem
still apply to anything is there still a paragraph with contents that
p .explanation
is going to affect?
I’m about to try the plugin out on a stylesheet that’s passed thorugh 4 different sites, all with the same base column layout and syntatic arrangements to weedle out the crap before I move it on the it’s 5th home which exists as a sister site to number 4 which will have many rules the same, but as many unique too. More as it happends