Show HN: My 24-hour project, instacss.com

[rgarcia]

http://instacss.com (in case DNS update hasn't propagated: http://morning-warrior-3377.herokuapp.com/)

Last night I was annoyed at how slow (and web 1.0-ish) most CSS reference sites seem to be, so I created this. It's basically a scrape of the CSS reference on w3schools, but with client side searching. Feedback is most welcome!

some of the tech involved: node, requirejs, backbone, mongodb

the code: http://github.com/rgarcia/instacss

[JoshTriplett]

Very awesome.

You could use Levenshtein distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance) as your search metric. That would provide two advantages: it would handle slight misspellings, and it would find the closest match first ("radius" would prefer "border-radius" to "border-top-left-radius", and "border" would prefer "border" as requested in another comment).

You might consider providing a quick list of the property names (perhaps over on the right) in addition to the fully expanded list, to make it easier to tell if you have the right results, and jump to them in the list.

Please put the "[source]" links closer to the content; right now they seem more closely associated with the following entry. How about putting the link near the top right of each entry instead?

Please don't fade the "default" and "inherited" text so close to white; I found it uncomfortable to read with that little contrast.

[2arrs2ells]

Any chance you could use the MozDev CSS reference instead? https://developer.mozilla.org/en/CSS/CSS_Reference

[drivingmenuts → 2arrs2ells]

Yeah. If you can speed up the MozDev reference, you've got something.

Also, needs an index for those times when I can't remember what I'm looking for.

[rgarcia → 2arrs2ells]

Thanks for the link. MozDev looks pretty good...I'll look into it some more. (or you could submit a pull request! :))

[nicwest → 2arrs2ells]

or have an option for source (just a radio with a default or something)

[rgarcia]

clickable: http://instacss.com (or http://morning-warrior-3377.herokuapp.com/)

[hackernews]

definitively useful, but some feedback:

+ Need a way to do an explicit search. There are a lot of shorthand properties and searching for "border" requires me to scroll way down to find the border reference doc. If I typed border: it should only show me one result.

+ The possible values need to be presented in a list. It is difficult to scan that paragraph to determine what are my options.

+ Make the search box position fixed. Maybe in the header? If no input is present in the search input, show the howto below. Make sure to add a background color to the howto to distinguish from results.

[rgarcia → hackernews]

Thanks for the feedback! The search algorithm is very basic right now, and will definitely change to address the "exact match" scenario. The paragraph was a mistake in the template that should be fixed shortly...

[qprofyeh → rgarcia]

I really like how you can actually use regexp to search though: "position" vs "^position".

How about changing the search box heading to something more instructive, more instant, like "Begin typing a CSS property". Also, I'd like to see filters like :hover.

Great job so far!

[rgarcia → qprofyeh]

Yeah, I like it too, but I don't think most people will think of typing "border$" to get just the "border" property :)

[sheppy → rgarcia]

A checkbox you can click to do a non-regexp exact match search would be handy.

[minikomi]

Minor nitpick - iOS defaults to first letter capitalized, thus getting no search results. You could either force downcase on the text area or ignore case in the search.

[artursapek → minikomi]

Good call. The author could easily force the query to be treated as all lowercase.

[rgarcia → artursapek]

yup, fixed!

[minikomi → rgarcia]

Thanks!

[artursapek]

W3schools isn't the greatest source. I agree, MozDev would be a better target for your scraping.

Also, many examples appear twice. (Try text-shadow, border-spacing)

[rgarcia → artursapek]

just switched to MozDev, try it out!

[kittxkat]

cool, super useful.

+++ superfast, the search-as-you-type is especially useful (not having to wait for something you just wanna "quickly lookup if you got it right in your head" is a MASSIVE plus!)

- you should really implement a "goto top" button, especially when there are more results

- placebo button. why is it there if it doesn't do anything? seems like you search after i type anyway, so why is there a button after all?

- wasn't clear what queries the search can handle, i.e. i wasn't sure what exactly could i look up. maybe you could give some examples on the start page, and also i would set the background of the search input field to say something like "search as you type", so it gets more clearer.

really, it's a fine site. but as there are only the site title "instaCSS", the tagline "gimme teh css" and a search field, it could have really profit for a bit more information about the service. not much, but subtle. it really wasn't clear what your service can do without the HN subtext.

[stoodder]

Love the idea, would be great to have a 'quick' link at the top that could jump me down the page to the correct section. For example. When I search for border, I get all of the possible permutations of that style. It'd be nice to have 'border, border-left, border-right' etc. listed at the top. When I click on one, I get taken to it's section on the page.

[julian37]

This looks really useful, thanks!

One suggestion: if you put "color" in the search box, you currently get "border-bottom-color", "column-rule-color", "border-top-color", and "color", in that order. It would make more sense to put "color", the exact match, at the very top. (And probably also to sort the remaining matches alphabetically.)

[rgarcia → julian37]

Since it's doing a regex search, for now you can type "^color" to match just "color"--I agree it's not optimal!

[mrpollo]

My suggestion would be to add a brief description of what i should be using as an input on your form, I first tried the url of a CSS file, then a selector, then when i started typing the selector i started seeing the actual properties display thats when i knew i had to input a css property, maybe It's just me.

[drewsmith]

After a quick glance, the examples seem to be duplicating for me. Also, is it really an example? It's more akin to an example usage I suppose, but it shouldn't be that hard to provide a true example right? Just slap a div with the inline css or store an example div column along with the example usage column.

[joliss]

What's the license for your code? You should put one in before you accept patches. ;-)

And the UI is totally awesome.

[waf]

My test case was typing in 'background', since I can never remember the order of all the values. It showed a lot of the border-* properties (but not all of them, background-position, for example), and didn't show plain old 'background'

[epenn]

How are you sorting these? I did a search for "border" just to try it out. It returned 18 entries with pretty much every variation of border-*, but border itself was the 16th entry almost at the end of the results page.

[rgarcia → epenn]

Right now it just sorts randomly, which I admit is pretty bad. The search itself is very basic--it just takes your query and regex matches it on property names in the db.

[morrow → rgarcia]

If you want to keep it simple, you could just sort by length, with shorter property names first. I think that would work pretty well for most cases (border would come before border-color, etc).

[vecter]

You couldn't post this under your original name?

[Rumnha]

This is fast. period. But when I searched for 'width' (without quotes) it showed all results (*width) but not for 'width' (exact). Same with 'background' css property. Otherwise it's awesome.

[Trezoid]

Placebo search button? Based on effect it doesn't seem to do anything, and visually it looks like it "sticks" and doesn't ever get "pressed" when you click on it.

also, it can't handle "gradient" at all.

[rgarcia → Trezoid]

Thanks for the feedback--I only search on property names (not descriptions or possible values), so that's why gradient doesn't work. It's a two-line change to add matching on values and descriptions, so I'll put it on the todo list of "advanced" search options.

[gregsadetsky]

This is great, congrats! I would love to have access to Python docs this way (builtins, the standard library, etc.). And Django's methods & template tags too...

[JoshTriplett]

Please consider using the HTML5 history API to change the page location to a URL that will work as a permalink to the search results.

[sheppy]

fwiw, we at Mozilla Developer Network think this is awesome. :)

[noformnocontent]

needs support for hashtags: http://instacss.com/#background

[noformnocontent → noformnocontent]

[proposal] add some layer of abstractions so different insta-docs (i.e. insta- html5, js, node, some-api) could be easily build on top of that engine

[rgarcia → noformnocontent]

It's on my list of todos! https://github.com/rgarcia/instacss/blob/master/static/js/vi...

[noformnocontent → rgarcia]

hm, i should have read the code first... although github issues is a better way to go, if crowdsourcing is appreciated

[grantjgordon]

Very nice. Way to use Bootstrap!

[greattypo]

Cool - I will totally use this.

[ykamakazi]

Love the license btw ;)

[thegorgon]

this is awesome. well done.

[binarydreams]

amazing, love it!

[kenok]

w3schools?

I'd recommend MozDev.