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

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

Cool - I will totally use this.

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

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.

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

And the UI is totally awesome.

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.

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)

Love the license btw ;)

Very nice. Way to use Bootstrap!

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.

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.

this is awesome. well done.

w3schools?

I'd recommend MozDev.

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'

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.

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.)

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

amazing, love it!

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...

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.