CSSVista - New Feature Idea
I've been thinking about a pretty smart addition to CSSVista 0.2's features.
It's taking the auto-complete a little further by including support for tag names, element IDs and class names that have been used in the HTML loaded in the browsers.
So it would trigger on pressing either "#" or "." or if you started typing outside braces. But it could also support things like li .selected (where it would predict both "li" and "selected").
What do you think? Obviously it could be turned off, would it get annoying? It could serve as a gentle reminder of the spelling/case of the classes and IDs you had used in your HTML, I think I would work faster if I had this.
Update: CSSVista 0.15 has been released.
Comments
May 26, 2006 7:46 PM
I think it's probably not as much benefit as I first thought when I read it, except for really, really big pages with loads of classes or pages that are maintained by people other than those that wrote them. While it's *really* useful as an aide-memoire to have code completion for CSS rules like border-collapse/background etc, typically my class/ID names are short and fairly memorable. And since I'm only usually typing them once or twice ... I think I usually don't use this in Dreamweaver. I can't see much of a use for predicting "li", to be honest ;)
I dunno, my opinion is that it's one of those things that for a single developer probably just falls the wrong side of a cost/benefit analysis. And any new feature has a concomitant cost in regression testing and stability ... I think in this case if it were me I'd go for simplicity and less testing.
Qualification: I'm basing this on the last piece of CSS that I did, where the longest rule in terms of text was ".thrash .header" and the longest in terms of depth was "#menu li ul li a", neither of which would have benefited much from completion. YMMV :D
May 26, 2006 8:34 PM
Russell, excellent point. And I think you're spot on.
I love the way I can just put these ideas out there as I think of them and get awesome responses like that one :)
I will eventually have to pick so many of these features to go into 0.2, then 0.3 etc... I think more than anything this stage is about deciding what people want to see in CSSVista, then it's up to me to fit what I can into each version.
Thanks again!
May 26, 2006 8:44 PM
I am all for simplicity and stability, but I think this feature would be a really great productivity enhancement.
Providing auto-complete for user-specific classes and IDs would be very useful, especially if it also worked when typing a tag (as suggested, "li .selected").
Beyond that, I think auto-complete for the different element states might be useful as well (e.g. a:hover, a:visited, etc.)
May 26, 2006 10:32 PM
Ah yes, ":" could be a useful trigger for element states.
Nice idea Sol :)
May 28, 2006 10:30 PM
This is must-have! Both Dreamweaver and Expression Web Designer support this and it's always has been my test to see if a web-developer tool is really worth it. Please add it or a way to turn it on and off! Thanks for all the great work!
May 31, 2006 11:44 PM
Hey Matt,
Just noticed that your blog wasn't displaying correctly in the Opera browser.
Tha body background is transparent. Experimented a bit and it was fixed by adding a float left property and a background:#fff property to the pagebody-inner id.
cheers !
May 31, 2006 11:44 PM
edit - leave out the float left property ...
June 2, 2006 9:19 AM
Woody - thank you for your feedback! I hope I can get it into 0.2
June 2, 2006 9:29 AM
Navjot - thank you very much! I've changed that now and tested it, thanks again!
August 18, 2006 9:45 PM
I noticed that there haven't been any entries about CSSVista in a while either on your site or the SiteVista site. Just wondering if you're still in development? If so do you have any estimate on when CSSVista will be updated?