CSS Lint v0.9.9 is now available both on the command line and at the web site. This release is mostly a maintenance release with a few small features added in. This lays the groundwork for an eventual 1.0.0 release, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility of a 0.9.10 release before then. There’s still a lot of work to do on the parser to make it fully CSS3 compliant, and if you’re interested in helping out, please take a look at the separate GitHub repository.

The biggest change to CSS Lint in this release are for the command line. The first change is the ability to specify some rules to ignore. This was requested by Zack Leatherman via Twitter, and fits in nicely with the options to set rules as warnings or errors. The intend to specify this to ignore is that you want to use all of the default settings except for omitting a few rules. The syntax is as follows:

csslint --ignore=important,ids file.css

The --ignore option follows the same format as --warnings and --errors, using a comma-delimited list of rules to ignore. Read more in the documentation.

The second change to the CLI is the ability to specify a configuration file with default options for CSS Lint. CSS Lint will look for the file named .csslintrc in the current working directory and use those options. The file is in the same format as the command line arguments so that you can do something like this:

--errors=important,ids
--format=checkstyle-xml

As long as this is in the current working directory when CSS Lint is run, those options will be picked up and used by default. Any options that are passed in on the command line will override those in the file.

For more information about the CLI, see the documentation.

In addition to that, we had several other small changes:

• Jos Hirth fixed several bugs, including some bugs in tests.
• Jonathan Barnett contributed a JUnit XML output format to allow easier integration with CI environments.
• Zach Leatherman removed references to Microsoft-specific vendor prefixes that will not be supported in Internet Explorer 10.

The last piece of news for this release is that CSS Lint is now on Travis CI, so you can always keep up to date as to the latest status of the build. Of course, we welcome all contributions from the community on GitHub, which is why we have an extensive Developer Guide to help you get setup and ready to submit your changes. Enjoy!

Disclaimer: Any viewpoints and opinions expressed in this article are those of Nicholas C. Zakas and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employer, my colleagues, Wrox Publishing, O'Reilly Publishing, or anyone else. I speak only for myself, not for them.