openstax / sifter

Search Book Content using a CSS or XPath selector

Structured Content Sifter

This searches our books using any CSS selector! You can share the link with others so they can see the results too.

• 👀 you can click the results to see the actual content!
• 0️⃣ Zero infrastructure to maintain!
• 🐁 just 150 lines of JS code!
• 🔗 share your search with others!
• ⚡ subsequent searches are Lightning fast! (reload the page)
• 🔌 you can search offline!

Examples

Knowledge of CSS selectors or XPath selectors is required for searching. See Help for a quick reference and links to more comprehensive documentation.

• Where do we use subscripts?
• Which content is marked .unnumbered
• Do we even use the <c:foreign> tag?
• Where are our footnotes?
• Does our content have a Note inside a Note?
• Links
  • What are all the external links?
  • Which links go to an unsecure site?
• Exercises with Solutions...
  • ... in the content (e.g. an Example Exercise)
  • ... at the back of the book
• XPath:
  • Exercises with Solutions at the back of the book
  • Invalid number of children in msubsup
  • The URL of all links containing the term openstaxcollege

Screencap

What is this sorcery?

It is a PWA which uses service-workers to run offline & cache the books locally (see the Lighthouse tab in Chrome).

It runs in your browser and pulls content from archive-staging.

So, are you saying the next time I'm ice-climbing in the Himalayas or free-soloing El Capitan I can find out which books have subfigures in them?

Absolutely!

Development

1. clone this repository and switch to this directory
2. start a little static webserver by running python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080 or python3 -m http.server 8080 depending on your Python version
3. visit http://localhost:8080/

ToDone

• Search CNXML
• Select subset of books to search
• Change which server to get content from (currently archive-staging)