Comments on: CSS Reviewr

By: Si Jobling

Si Jobling — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 09:14:20 +0000

What a great tool to add to a web developer’s arsenal! I remember you talking about this app back at Yahoo so it’s great to see it come to light after all this time.

I’ll certainly be putting it through the mill and suggesting any feature requests when they arise.

Good work Klaus.

By: Neil Crosby

Neil Crosby — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 14:13:05 +0000

Oooh, here’s another one I noticed the reviewr isn’t noticing. If you have a shorthand rule and a longhand rule that overwrites it, the reviewr isn’t picking up on that and suggesting that you merge them. The example I saw in some CSS I was looking over was:

p {
margin: 0;
margin-top: 5px;
}

The reviewr probably should have suggested merging that into `p { 5px 0 0 0; }`.

By: Neil Crosby

Neil Crosby — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:49:21 +0000

It’s really good to see this finally out in the wild, Klaus.

That said, I’ve got a few questions, feature requests and the like. So, here goes:

* First off, is there a list somewhere of all the recommendations the tool makes? Having this list available and browsable would be incredibly valuable in my opinion.
* Currently the tool doesn’t pick up on repeated semi-colons at the end of CSS rules. Whilst they aren’t bad per se, they’re a stylistic thing that might be worth picking up on.
* Slightly more important is the fact that the tool doesn’t pick up on “missing” semi-colons from the end of final CSS rules. Again, whilst not invalid, these semicolons being missing did cause issues with earlier versions of Safari.
* When CSSReviewr finds issues with a CSS file, the title of the page changes to “[Invalid]“, which seems a little harsh, since CSSReviewr is checking the style, not the validity of the CSS document.
* As a feature request, it would be lovely to be able to turn rulesets on and off, in the same way as JSLint allows. Having this feature would also make the rulesets used by the tool public, which I feel would be an educationally good thing.

Oh, and one more thing – you’ve got a GitHub repo for this – why isn’t the code for the site in it?

By: Ben Ward

Ben Ward — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:21:28 +0000

Wowee, this is excellent Klaus! Really, really powerful stuff.

Feature request time:

• Against each of the rules you’re enforcing, it would be great to see citations for the reason behind it. Either a link to an article that justifies it, or a short chunk of expanded text explaining why you should do something a certain way. For example, in the post above you make the point about using ‘arial’ over ‘Arial’. I didn’t know about that one, and I presume there’s a robustness based reason behind it. Having a quick click to find out about why one syntax is better than another would definitely help the education benefit of this tool.

Great work!