Slashdot Mirror
Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards
Joe Clark writes "Nearly a year after an interview with this correspondent highlighted a few problems with Slashdot's HTML, Daniel M. Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets. Frommelt projects four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign, were it adopted, not to mention better appearance in a wide range of browsers and improved accessibility. Next he needs volunteers to retool the Slashdot engine. And yes, he did it all with CmdrTaco's blessing." Slashdot has kept its HTML 3.2 design for a long time ("because it works"), but perhaps this effort will be a catalyst for change...
I'm all for it. If it makes /. load faster when I hit CTRL-R 10 times per half hour then I'd be very happy!
On second thought, that could mean more time working. Scratch the idea.
It'll be nice to be able to just edit out the div id=advertisement so when they move it around I still get rid of the ads.
It's not a good sign when my mousewheel scrolling in Firebird mysteriously stops working on the article page :)
PLEASE, whatever you do, just don't optimize it for any specific browser.
Slashdot readers use perhaps the most varied array of operating systems of any news site, and I can bet you that if our Linux, Mac, Solaris, BSD, UNIX, BeOS, etc. users could not access the web site because they had no access to the latest version of IE, that it would be quite a mess.
Please, please, support web standards that can make web sites available to everyone.
Hell just froze over.
Brr.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
They're actually proud of this? That they went so many years without complying to HTML standards? It is obvious that Slashdot was just planning to break the HTML standard to force everyone to use Slashdot's "integrated" browser, Mozilla.
This isn't the first time this has happened. Remember when BBS's became popular, and Slashdot "integrated" one into their site to kill any competition? Or all the times that Slashdot has brought down "competing" sites by linking to them, thereby safeguarding their website monopoly?
It's a shame that the DoJ let them off for this....
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
Finally, Slashdot! This will mean faster browsing for all of us, and much less bandwith costs to Slashdot. :) Webstandarts are here to rule, I hope.
I just wonder... how compatible will this be with IE?
Yeesh. Beats the hell out of my site. Feel free to click on it to console me though. :-)
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
Could you please make page 2 of comments actually be page 2 of the comments. I might be incredibly naive, but it seems something more like page 1.5. I don't know about the rest of you, but I always just read the odd numbered pages of comments, because like way too much stuff if repeated from the previous page on the even numbered ones.
I hope this would help with all of the random 500 errors and missing images that folks randomly get. Id also like to see something else than Times New Roman :)
but perhaps this effort will be a catalyst for change...
How about a new look altogether?
I had a look at the new site, and while it does fix many problems and should certainly be used to replace the existing setup, why not go a little farther and retool the look of the site as well?
The look of slashdot has barely changed since the late 90's, and while the look certainly brings part of it's character, it's beginning to look dated. Perhaps it can be redesigned with a more effecient and cohesive interface while still retaining some of it's previous character?
Or is it just a pipe-dream...
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
will this work for browsers for those with disabilities? I think its only fair, considering I clicked on slashdot Games article and am now freakin' blind.
Wait a second... How about the half-dozen or so people who are paid to keep slashdot running?!?
Damn. I wish I could just ask for volunteers to do my job for me and kick back and reap the benefits while they do the hard work.
I like it! Looks just fine in Safari 1.1.1 on Panther.
I love the option of giving the users a choice too! Using the CSS import option would be great. Just create 3 or 4 color schemes and give people a choice (at least for the "main" part of it).
The prototype is slowing already. You bastards! you slashdotted slashdot!
Finally, my .sig will make sense!!!
#define DRM chmod 000
Could this be why IE randomly interprets slashdot as big5 chinese?
I'm sure I'll be modded down, but I'd like to point this bug. Having comments not work at level 2 is quite frustrating.
This is long long long long long overdue. Just because HTML 3.2 "worked" didn't make it good, or right. A proper application of [X]HTML and CSS can be a huge bandwidth saver. It looks like Google also updated their design yesterday or today - no doubt to subtly cut down on the huge amounts of bandwidth they serve out. More importantly for Slashdot, however, is that writing their code in an open and updated fashion really opens up the market for the kinds of people that can access the site, and that's never a bad thing. So congratulations on starting this project, and I hope it gets underway soon!
.sig!
Now maybe I'll finally be able to change my
When the time comes, please add some code to switch to a light design when browsing with a PDA. I know right now you can select light mode, but it affects all browsers used from an account which isn't at all what I want...
The example link is here:
http://www.alistapart.com/d/slashdot/index.html
here too :p
In firebird on debian stable at 1024X768 it looks better and more tied together than the ususal slashcode output. That being said, it should look the same on every browser, YMMV but to me it doesn't. Opera looks confused, IE looks the same, Konqueror and Galeon look as good as normal. One geek's opinion....
~corporate tool, but employed~
So I looked at final example and I was just about to complain about how messed up it was. The words in the boxes on the right were all scrunched against the left edge. There were these stupid little dots in front of the links. It was just plain ugly. Then I went to the real site and realized it had always been that way, I just haven't paid attention to it.
Actually, they have been complying with HTML standards, just the old version 3.2. I say kudos to them for trying to keep /. complying with the new standards, to ensure that it will appear identically regardless of the browser or platform.
Crushing dreams at the speed of sarcasm
Yes. I'd like to see what the result was too. That's why I clicked on the links in the article to the various recreated pages.
I've always been partial to F5 myself.
In any case, I've looked at the final example (the "optimized" page), and while it's nice to see someone pushing for the adoption of `cutting edge' (as of 1999) CSS, how about eliminating all of the completely wasteful, bandwidth and processor consuming, whitespace? Unless this is python at whitespace affects scope (which it isn't), I don't see why so many sites have such a fetish with tabbed and spaced HTML when the browser discards it as garbage bytes, actually wasting time (albeit a tiny amount, but nonetheless) parsing through it.
Daniel M. Frommelt is the University World Wide Web Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin - Platteville, an executive committee member of the Campus Web Council of Wisconsin, and a web standards advocate. Daniel spends his free time brewing beer.
I like the guy already.
Gotta get me one of these!
I, for one, welcome ou... er, I, for one, would love to see slashdot switch to LOGICAL layout with formatting via CSS. Besides the fact that the biggest geek site would actually have geeky markup, it would make Slashdot's front page basically a chunk of parseable XML data, which would create all kinds of cool possibilities.
.. wrap articles in DIV's please .. GOD WHY...WHY..."
Though the only possibility I'm interested in is getting an RSS feed of slashdot *with my login settings*. I have already done this with other sites using hand-written scrapers in Perl with HTML Tidy and libxml.
I *tried* to scrape slashdot's front page (including the "lite" version) using the XML parser, but after a few iterations both me and the parser were lying on the ground, twitching and drooling, muttering "paragraph tag is a container...paragraph tag is a container
So, yeah, I hope this motivates somebody out there to fix this stuff up (I don't think the slashdot krew is going to do it, and most people I know who've considered slashcode for a big site have run away screaming in horror at the code, but somebody out there must have the itch...)
That's all well and good, but you don't want to break the old page. I read slashdot often with my "text zoom" on mozilla 1.0.1 at 120 or 150%.
Right now slashdot looks normal at any text zoom setting, but the version proposed in the article hides parts of words when I turn up my zoom to 200%. I don't often read with text that large, but I've done it before, and I'm sure there's users out there who do it regularily.
Perhaps you could add a section to preferences that lets users choose which color schemes to use on all of the Slashdot sections. If they don't want to set the same color for all sections, let them choose a default (individual settings for each section would probably eat up a lot of space).
Some years ago they discussed if the new millennium would begin 2000 or 2001. Definitely it begins in 2004. Contemporary web standards for Slashdot! I get crazy now and party like there's no tomorrow! Whooohhhhhooo!
How's that for a jab in the ribs.
...
Latest story in YRO
"How SCO Helped Linux Go Enterprise"
Turning a profit using lawyers?
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
It would be GREAT to see them finally, 3 or 4 years later, dump the old theme and streamline it with CSS and stuff. Is it going to happen anytime soon. Probably not.....
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Its just another website. If you ask me, if you'r gunna retool slashdot, you should be using XML for all the data and then XSLT + CSS for the style. Makes more sence. That way other devices such as PDAs and phones can more easily receive the content and style it according to their liking!
:) although i shouldnt be because this will prollly never happen!
I know XML doesnt have the greatest support in some browsers and i dont like the idea of XML mimetypes although it'll have greater use in the future no dobut! But maybe a cocoon?? server could be setup for those with old browsers or new browsers with old support?!?
I love XML... I'd also appreciate an XUL version of slashdot. But thats what good about XML, you could provide so many different versions of slashdot for all. Also you could keep upgrading slashdot but also allow it to have backwards compatibility by allowing people to use different rendered versions of slashdot. Such as a HTML3.2, an HTML4, XHTML or XML/XSL etc.
But the emphisis here is that, you could make every type of slashdot. Also with the amount of things being submitted and the user jounals an enhanced search engine could also be built, or USERs could build their own XSL and CSS style sheets to view slashdot the way they want.
I tells ya, im excited
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
At the risk of being redundant, this is a good move. For those who are earnestly looking, there is an online sample available. In my quick experience the page rendered a bit quicker on Safari.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
In indexwithoutmarkup.html, the title "Sections" on the left side overlaps the story text in the middle section, with the default font size. In the final version, it just gets cut off when I expand the font size (I would expect the column to expand so you can read the text).
In both versions, the longer section titles like "Askslashdot" and "Developers" overlap the story text when the font size is set high enough. Apart from that, everything looks fine (or more accurately, it looks pretty much the same as Slashdot does now).
Now that you've made slashdot standards compliant, why not make it look good? CSS has powerful leading, word spacing and font tools (all of them with relative measurements to look good across most browsers). If a browser doesn't like a text attribute, it won't display it, so you won't have to worry about the same unpredictability as you would with layers and div boxes. The one thing that sucks the most on slashdot is its typesetting. Type is the one thing web designers forget about, but doing it right drastically improves the appearance and readability of a site.
all that is left to make slashcode usuable is to upgrade the database to a real database and re-write the code in a real programing language.
is a bad idea. Personally, I like it. Reducing the necessary bandwidth to use the site is a good thing though for everyone involved. Why spend money you don't have to in a down economy.
/. is not an issue so what's to prove by changing the look? Gain new users? Have more impact?
/. would prove to be a mistake.
Things do look a bit dated, but maybe that is a good thing. The popularity of
Anyone that matters knows the site already. The content is the reason they return, not the pretty icons. Getting more impact through a more compelling rendering might matter to a few folks, but will the expense be worth it?
Maybe this is the wrong comparison... Take an established publication like the Times or WSJ. Do they make big changes often? No. The formula works and is a big part of their identity.
I think they keep things the way they are because they know change works against the needs of their readers; namely, access to relevant content easily.
Unless I am missing something, major changes to
Blogging because I can...
There is a project called CSSZenGarden. It's a collection of different stylesheets which modify the same content according to contributor's tastes and design abilities. There are few dozens of examples, and amongst them there is the Slashdot interface, albeit not a perfect copy as shows in the article.
You can view all the available CSS designs here. Same content, different stylesheet. Just shows off all the wonderful things that's possible with CSS standards-based page creation.
"HTML is dead." - Friedrich Nietzsche
/. makes money off ads and subscriptions. Why should we work for free? After all, the editors will not even edit their site nor will the check for dups. And some of the bandwidth cost savings could go to those that do the work.
That's not true.
I think Its a great idea that slashdot is complying with the w3c standards. Howerver; not all browsers comply with the w3c standards. I'm currently designing a website for an individual. I tried to use the CSS1 tag, background-attachment: fixed; and I quickly foundout that IE does not fully support CSS1. I have validated my html code, and yes, It does make it more compatible with browsers. I worked out a lot of cross browser issues by simply validating the code.
This was the "final example".
These are all under the "Applying the skin" section.
Did you actually want image files or something crazy like that?
I propose we redesign Slashdot in HTML 3.2 - better yet, let's rewrite it for Gopher. At least I could view a Gopher page in my choice of font!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Please note that CmdrTaco and Co. had bugger all to do with this redesign - it was done entirely independently.
Also note that the really hard part (whipping Slashcode into shape to generate the new CSS-based markup) has not yet been done.
Why aren't the submitted articles in italics? Personally I would prefer that to quotes, but maybe that's just me.
Have you tried Linux yet?
Actually I'm wondering if this "redesign" has anything to do with what newsforge went through? Note that that wasn't as well recieved. Anyway with the right backend Slashdot could serve not only regular browsers, but WAP and other wireless devices. Hell if you wanted, you could go all the way back to mosaic. Plus it will be easier to integrate new standards as they come around.[1]
[1] Plus it will be easier to do value-add (like Arstechnica's PDF article links)
Its about time. Not only will this make Slashdot more portable, but it can save lots of bandwidth, both for Slashdot and for all of the users.
Also, this will make it much easier to apply user style sheets.
Unfortunately, this was just a demonstration, not an actual change to Slashcode.
All sites that use Slashcode will benefit!
The bit that impresses me more is that the page rendered properly with Mozilla Firebird 0.7 on Win32. The real slashdot doesn't render particularly well at all with Firebird for me.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
And here we thought it was your extracurricular activities that was the cause.
Dumbass.
That kind of reminds me of an older article, Microsoft Free Fridays...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Now, how about getting the featured sites tuned up too so that don't take such a /. beating.
/. can take a /.ing but no one else can..
Seems that
Perhaps by saving bandwidth with the new design, some of that bandwidth can be used to mirror some of the (mickey-mouse hosted) sites prior to publishing them. Then everyone could get a chance to see the site or a facsimle thereof.
Now that full page of whitespace on every comments page is gone. It looks a lot "cleaner" too, I like it... seems to load a bit faster as well. I thought a few of the editors used Powerbooks? Guess they're using a Gecko browser.
Is that a Safari bug btw? Or broken code that's become "standard"? Fixed in Panther?
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Only 50 million?
What?
Am I the only one reading
(*sound of crickets*)
Not a flame.
If you're thinking of retooling the slash engine itself, I hope you consider some of the oft-complained areas for the most improvement. Things get mixed up in any random-access submission "queue" engine, but slash seems to suffer from these things often. Even editors have grumbled about not seeing other editors' status on various stories.
[
Many languages have two articles, which correspond to English "an" and "the". Many of those languages have multiple forms, called "allomorphs," for each article, determined by context; in English, "an" becomes "a" before a consonant and "some" before a mass or plural noun. Russian has no articles, their function having been replaced by sticking nouns before the verb (to imply "the"-itude) or after the verb (to imply "a"-ness).
Another meaning of "article" is any of the interesting pages linked to in the story at the top of a Slashdot article.pl page. In this case, Slashdot users would call this page "the article".
Will I retire or break 10K?
Not sure if this is going to get posted before I submit, anyhow, I found this:
http://www.alistapart.com/d/slashdot/index2.html
Well that's one of the key reasons to convert it - an alternate stylesheet can be provided for PDAs, though I don't know if any actually use it -- but more importantly it will lay out in clean text and respect the semantic structure, showing headlines (H tags), paragraphs, lists, etc., so all the freaks here could check it on their phones and such constantly and it should be good and readable.
Seems like for a tech site that is rather obsessed with open standards this place would come at least a little close to validating via the W3C The new XHTML & CSS they have whipped up looks good and renders A LOT faster in both IE and Opera on my PC.
Ummm...no. Remember the transformations happen on the server side. With User CSS on the client. It's still (X)HTML being piped through. It will actually be smaller without all the tables, and other workarounds. Remember a lot of tags are deprecated, and HTML has become more efficient.
Good article, just a couple of suggestions...
In general, it's usually better to avoid giving layout-suggestive names to your div tags. In the example, the author calls the Login/Sections/Help div leftcolumn. It would probably be better to name it something that is more suggestive of it's content rather than it's location - this way, if in the future a new skin was added that moved the content to the right-side, or even bottom of the page, the div name wouldn't contradict it's location.
Another suggestion would be to disable all images in the print.css file. The author already went ahead and disabled the advertisement, the left and right columns, but he left those pesky story icons. I know that when I print an article, usually all I care about is the text. It's a simple way to make a page a little more printer friendly.
My last suggestion would be to move the content div tag, up near the top of the page. This way, as your browser downloads the information from the server, it will download the story information (important) before downloading the left/righthand content panes (unimportant). If someone stops loading their browser before the page download has been completed, at least the browser can attempt to render the story data. And with css, the layout will be preserved.
i just went to the new slashdot code, and it looks horrible in konqueror. /. code renders fine though.
the actual
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
How about this for the original and then this for the result and also have a look at this for an alternative
Yes, and that is why we won't see it happen anytime soon. Slash is generated with Templates. And if you have ever looked at the template code, you'll see what a mess it is.....
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
how about eliminating all of the completely wasteful, bandwidth and processor consuming, whitespace?
As you point out, XML, CSS, and ECMAScript, unlike Python, are not very sensitive to whitespace. Slashdot can mitigate whitespace's contribution to bandwidth in two ways: 1. mod_gzip (which Slashdot already uses), and 2. caching proxies that strip excess whitespace. But this article itself is intended to be read by developers, and clarity counts.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There's a whole world of this type of customization easily possible with clean CSS/XHTML.
User-selectable layouts, colors, fonts, font-size, etc. All without modifying any of the content, or adding a bunch of crap into the HTML.
The only people possibly disserved by this is anyone still using Netscape 4.x, who should be barred from using a computer anyway. If it's a company policy, try a proxy and and/or use Lynx from an external box! Or just don't bother.
Why would you have to switch to XHTML in a year?
HTML 3.2 is here to stay.
Working for fucking free? May I mow your lawn Mr. Malda?
Both the NYT and WSJ performed substantial redesigns of their print editions over the past few years actually. Without losing their (built up over decades) identity.
They do it by making iterative and evolutionary changes (though the NYT finally using color ink was a bit revolutionary for them). The same could be done here without the site losing its character.
The updated design is unusable on my Danger hiptop, as all the article summaries get squeezed into a narrow column one or two words wide. Classic Slashdot comes out fine. (Yes, I know, this is almost certainly a problem with the hiptop and/or the Danger proxy system, not with the webpage itself).
Really? That's odd... when I used Win32 before, Firebird 0.7, which was what I was using, never had any problems; it displayed the same as 0.7 under Linux does now.
Bít, zabít, jen proto, ze su liska!
Come on, Slashdot still hasn't converted its GIFs to PNGs. That alone would save a good amount of bandwidth, not to mention that Slashdot is supposedly pro-open source and all that.
The only argument I've seen against them is for compatibility's sake -- honestly, I would be surprised if even as much as 1% of Slashdot's readership was using an image-based browser that did not support PNGs. There are probably plugins available for the ones that don't. So, why not?
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
I have been having problems as well. If I post and try to view my post I get a blank screen. Also if I hit the back button I often get a blank. I am using Lynx at this moment now, beacause I am upgrading my bsd installation and don't have x up yet.
Many a long talk since then I have had with the man in the moon; he had my confidence on the voyage. Joshua Slocum
The lightbulb hasn't changed for longer than that
Yes it has.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Slashdot has kept its HTML 3.2 design for a long time ("because it works")
HTML 3.2 with tables does not work for forums. It requires the server to detect and break up long words, which is difficult to code and annoys anyone who tries to copy a URL from a comment. If the pages used a CSS layout instead of a table layout, one wide post wouldn't cause all the other posts to wrap at the longer width.
The shareholder is always right.
C'mon now, /.'s not perfect. After all, just wait 3 days and we'll see Taco post this story again with different wording :p
Fast page loads would be one thing. Do a view page sometime and see all the CRAP that is in there. If you could reduce it then you could be speeding up your web viewing (slashdot reading) experience, and unclogging/freeing up Slashdot's bandwidth. Sounds like a win/win to me.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
If Slashdot is going to be recoded, I would like to ask for four features that are easy to implement, and that would be very nice to have.
1. When you click on your username, you see all of your comments, and next to your comments, you see the number of replies to your comments.
It would be really nice if this number would be clickable, so you could immediately read the replies to your comments. (It's quite complicated to get to the replies now, especially when you've put a high comment threshold in place)
2. Can story submissions be placed (more logically & more conveniently) on people's slashdot-homepages, instead of on the page that you get when you click on "submit story"?
3. It would be nice if you could see your own story submissions (not just the subject, but also the body & other details) when you click on them. Just to see them back.
4. Could the default comment-submission mode be changed to "plain old text" instead of "html-formatted"?
It is confusing that you have to write your own html in a text area on slashdot to get something as basic as newlines, where there is no other site that I can think of - not even a geeky one - that requires you to manually enter the BRs.
It's just not useful, not intuitive and not nice this way.
14 gigs PER DAY savings ????
I do ~90-100 gigs per MONTH and freak out at that.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
I will never bitch about my bandwidth use again.
Only on
While you're updating the (X)HTML to be compliant, why don't you make the search engine actually search? As it is now it's almost completely random as to what you get when you click "search", no matter what you put in the box. I've gotten completely different results just by hitting reload.
- Sherman
Though if you read the blurb you'd notice:
four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign
Though I personally think Slashdot should look something like this All you aesthetic-less, function-over-form folks who are screaming right now might enjoy the the "LITE" link... though the site is very standards/accessibility friendly and with a pretty face!
Ok, I like ALA, I'm a bit of standards guy even, my whole website is XHTML 1.0 strict. Unfortuanately slashdot has a table based layout, which, to put it simply, CSS cannot handle. I've spent days researching correct CSS tables in the past and it is an impossibility. The problem? Font overlapping. Try a text zoom to as little as 200% (yes, doubling the text size is not that extreme) and most CSS table based designs instantly break. Much like this one. My site works fine with it as everything is position ed such that font size only breaks at absurdly high magnification, but if it were any more complex I'd HAVE to use tables. I don't know if this si a browser issue, or a problem with the CSS spec, but text overflow is a serious issue, one which breaks nearly every CSS page with complex layout in existance. There needs to be a way to style tables in CSS without having to use a table tag. In short, CSS boxes are just that, boxes, they don't link together to correctly handle font sizes. The new slashdot is more broken than the current slashdot in a functional sense.
Photos.
The problem, is, Slashdot will lose revenue when folks start to strip out the ads (I guess this is how they 'profit'). So, what they should do is arrange to charge folks who want XML to do all kinds of 'cool' things.
/. on my Palm. Download about 500K of compressed /. a night!
I'd pay, because I'm a scraper, and it'd be worth it to me to be able to not have to keep my scraper up-to-date (need to change it every couple of months), plus do a better job scraping.
I scrape to HTML for input to iSilo to read
While they're at it, they could do even more tweaking to reduce bandwidth and speed up page loads.
For example, they could put static content (side bar with Help, Stories, About, etc., bottom bar with home, awards, etc.) into seperate iframes. Then they'll get cached as static data, too. Adding Expires: and/or Cache-control: public, max-age=x HTTP headers to images, stylesheets and other static elements would explicitly flag them as static and cacheable. Finally, they could convert all their GIFs to PNGs, which are typically slightly smaller.
Well, if you'd read the article, you would realise they _did_ change the page to XHTML 1.0
From the stripped down version, the code was converted to XHTML 1.0 Transitional, and validated.
In order to preserve my strained eyesight, I browse with FireBird 0.7, and make the fonts pretty large. In the current version of slashdot, that is no problem: the whole page scales perfectly. The layout is preserved, it's practically the same page, only larger and much easier to read.
In the alternative version, however, the text column (div class="leftcolumn") invades the central content column (div class="centercolumn" id='content') when enlarged. For me, and others like me, that is certainly a disadvantage.
I set my preference to the lowest bandwidth usage I could and now it's just a bit of hyperlinked text, with simple formatting and that's fine.
Quick, essential.
Why complicate the plumbing when it'll only stop up the drain?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I spend quite a bit of time on /. I would like very much for a caching server that remembers each comment and story individually and only gets the general layout + updates from /.
Then, when I recheck a story I looked at earlier, it would only need to load the new comments. Older comments would be fetched locally.
I would prefer if it served up advertising, too. It could just send back to /. x# of page hits. Heck, my only complaint on /. ads is that we're paying for the bandwidth in time and money to see the same ads repeatedly.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
It's about time /. had a standards compliant site. You'd think it would have been done long ago considering all the bitching we do about embracing open standards.
With the huge quantity of visitors that /. gets, I think it would be a primary goal of a site redesign (or refactoring or whatever) to reduce the average page size.
;-) That would be an interesting compression method.
Maybe you could minimize page size by storing the HTML for a comment as a prefab in a javascript method and then much of the page could be generated at the client side. Instead of repeatedly sending a common block of HTML code you could call a function to write that block to the document. Name the function witha single character and you will probably save a k or 2 or large pages. Multiply by the number of visitors
Also when the pages are published you should remove all non-signifigant whitespace.
http://brandonbloom.name
Open Source at its finest? Its so broken it can't be fixed, and "fuck standards."
Their layout.css is actually broken. It uses a fixed number of pixels for the widths of various things like the side menu area. It should, instead, use a percentage, and allow the browser to freely adapt the sizes to accomodate font size changes that the user have have legitimate reasons to override. Pixels are not all the same size, and people often need different fonts.
I tried the example pages in two browsers, Netscape 4.77 and Firebird 0.7. In NS, it does the "fail gracefully" OK. In FB, when I use the font settings I have to use to be able to read all text due to a combination of pixel density, monitor size, and vision requirements, a few things are "off size". They wouldn't be if margins were allowed to float.
Many web designers come from graphical arts training in other media, where sizes are generally tightly controlled, and pixels are not the usual measure. When they come to dealing with the web, they bring these limitations to a new medium which can (and should) work within a varying range of sizes and pixel densities (it makes showing things like icons in images rather difficult). I still see way too many web sites which only render on the left half of the page (sometimes they do manage to center it, but sill waste a huge chunk of space which could better be used to show more things in larger, easier to read for me, fonts).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
As long as it can select sheets based on browser agent, yeah. :)
A simple popup in the Preferences doesn't do it...
The example page does look pretty much exactly like the existing Slashdot layout, to which I say job well done. The only problem I see with it is that, at least in IE6, when the window isn't maximized, the category images all crowd up in the visible window and overlap things they aren't supposed to instead of trailing off the visible screen to the right. I don't know anything about advanced HTML, so I don't know whether that's a bug or a limitation of the technique, but it's definitely a big issue, I'd think.
Anyone else think it was way past the time that the editors actually did something along these lines?
Yes. You'll note my added emphasis. Rob sold Slashdot for what, >$1M? What the fuck does he do?
Zero rendering problems 0.7 or 0.7 aebrahim. XP Pro.
Ever.
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
With my browser (Konqueror - MDK 9.2) the 'final version' spread the top row of icons through out the first story summary...
the italic words on slashdot are rendered in bold on konqueror 3.1.4 no matter what font i use. also, the font for comments seem to depend on the general font of X and konqueror. i would prefer if slashdot specified a standard typeface for comments and other aspects of the website. while slashdot loads pretty quick here, i would welcome a fresh look to the website. a better way to view comments would be nice too. the threaded system is cumbersome when there are too many comments. just my $0.02
If XHTML, there are some things to consider:
It's important to note that using XHTML 1.1 requires you to send your documents as XML. This means the document should have an XML declaration above the doctype, and needs to be sent with an XML mime-type, ideally application/xhtml+xml. This has a significant drawback; IE can't see it.
A fairly well established workaround is to use mod_rewrite and munge the mime-type of a document based on what a user agent sends in its Accept header (To date, Mozilla is the only browser to include application/xhtml+xml in its Accept header). However, some would argue that this too has drawbacks. Since only Mozilla understands application/xhtml+xml, your documents will be sent as text/html, and XHTML does not validate as HTML.
The arguments around this issue have been summarized in the widely linked "Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful"
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
The text doesn't expand to fill the width when it is wide, (Hi klerk! just thought of you) and when it gets small it gets an obnoxious scroll bar.
Compliant html pages usually suck. The html standard should be re-mapped to what works.
Suckage was heavy when viewed with links also.
Well kid, don't put this one on your resume when you apply at MY company.
Keeping up with fashion is idiotic. Some people like fashion and even make a living out of it, but you can avoid its cost by using a timeless design.
This is achieved by choosing a bland design: uniform color elements, no texture, no fluff, no fashion statement.
Also you must NOT change the look that you have unless there's a very good reason, like to make the design even more bland.
...to the sites /. links to, and we're talking! (though people might miss being able to use slashdot as a verb)
If you're going to have to retool the engine to generate XHTML, might as well go the next level have it generate XML. That way you have absolutely no layout markup in the code, and the entire layout can be handled by an XSLT and the presented CSS.
However, someone sufficiently motivated can rip it out and slap in something new. Sometimes people end up rewriting amazing portions of software when it's big enough. I'm not sure slashdot really does enough to warrant that kind of manhandling, it might be better to start entirely over.
But then, I've never looked into slashcode, because while slashdot is a fine site, I would never want to run it. I'll learn a lot more if I write my own code, and I don't have lofty goals for my website.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
These /> to close a tag waste one byte, and I see no benefit.
Get rid of the advertising, that will speed it up nicely =D (I know, I know, it wont happen!) I understand you have to "pay the bills" somehow, but web advertising has turned the incredible world of the Internet into nearly the same garbage pit that TV / Cable has become... To your credit you don't skullfuck me with popups / popunders etc whenever I visit your site... I think your subscription service is a good idea and its going in the right direction, so maybe as you grow so will the benefits of subscribing.. For now, I am forced to scrub my web browsing experience to remove just about anything at all that is ad-like....Sorry, I just cant stand to see it.
Good link, but broken. It works better than any other 3 column CSS layout I've seen. Unfortuanately, it doesn't let fonts resize in IE (at least trying on my IE 6, which does resize fonts correctly on other sites). It's nice that they've gotten so much farther. I dont' have time to check out there CSS or anything, but thanks for the link, and I hope that there will be a solution.
Photos.
the "Reparent Highly Rated Comments (causes comments to be displayed even if they are replies to comments under current threshold)" setting on the Comments preferences page. I usually turn it off since I hate reading replies to messages I don't see, but that would cause the missing comments you are complaining about.
Hate to reply twice. But a normal HTML table gets larger as the text inside of it gets larger. The linked to CSS table stays a fixed pixel size regardless of font size (i'm using firebird atm, as i mentioned above it resizes not at all in IE). Table resizing is of course NECESSARY because what use are increased font sizes if they must be stuffed into tiny boxes! Good attempt, but a table replacement it is not.
Photos.
I still have old HTML style tags on my site. If something as ponderous as /. switches, I guess I'll have to swallow my pride and learn how all the new tags work. Crap. At least, since it's php, I won't have to deal with style sheets. Just update one page and they all update.
Since this is not a 'hot' news item, what does it matter?
you can acheive the same effect using nested divs (they nest like frames, and size like "table" elements if you set the margins/width/height to auto... that's how you're supposed to do it.)
ARE YOU CRAZY?
I've gotta ask... doesn't slashdot use mod_gzip? Was that factored into the bandwidth estimates?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I tried it on my phone, and the display is lots more readable.
The original version had lots of italics and the text flow wasn't great.
The updated version looked much better (except that the header of the first story was separated from the body by the section nav and poll and stuff)
Handspring Treo 600, blazer browser.
Now there's no reason to fix http://slashdot.org/palm (which doesn't seem to work) to be as good as http://www.wired.com/news_drop/palm looks on a handheld.
Maybe even make it automatic.
That size does pixels and percents not percents alone. The box sizes on that site are hard coded to the browser width with a width:100%. This is WRONG. Why? if you were to try and make extra large font sizes (for a sight disabled person) the font sizes increase, but the boxes take up the same portion of space on the page. With tables, the whole page physically expands. meaning some horizontal scrolling action goes on. Additionally, that page does not work in reverse. If you narrow down your browser window the right column goes in back of the center column! That is EXTREMELY broken. So yes, fonts can increase with percents, but on that site the containers are percent specified based on a pixel (browser width) value. This leaves them effectively pixel specified. specified creating problems. This was all observed on mozilla firebird.
Photos.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - web description language HTML was found dead on AOL this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to bandwidth spoiling. Truly a Swiss icon.
You've gotten mixed up, I hope you meant to respond to the other post because my page is clearly, http://www.andrewvc.com and the bluerobot page is the one i cite as wrong. I'm just clearning this up for any readers who get teh wrong idea.
Photos.
The Dillo browser has been unable to render slashdot since the changes to the site in sept. See http://www.mail-archive.com/newbie@linux-mandrake. com/msg135413.html Please support lightweight browsers such as Dillo in the next version--I think this rules out css.
Let's all call people stupid. That'll make it all better.
I read your post as having a different parent. I'm sorry.
Photos.
I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve : 403 Forbidden Please make sure you have entered the URI correctly.
Never pet a burning dog.
You're wasting my precious bandwidth.
There's no way to tell a DIV to be a certain width & height, but grow larger if the content demands it. Feel free to post some html and prove me wrong.
I'm being facetious of course -- Tables are only better because they have certain features that weren't included in CSS for whatever reason.
i did read it, but i said it should be XHTML STRICT, not TRANSITIONAL
Investing forum
This is an elegantly-designed page, and a nice recode of the original.
For the last several months I've been working on the same project from a slightly different perspective. We have a working Slash-based site, currently in live beta, at http://www.news4neighbors.net.
The site doesn't validate, but it's all structural XHTML with CSS for layout and style. This is much rougher than the beautiful markup presented here, but the difference is that nearly our entire site is running this template system. My work is based on the Openflows strict theme, released early this year at http://strict.openflows.org. But not much of that theme is left, as their project and mine had very different goals. I've changed all of the 120-something templates, and much of the code that sends them data.
The site needs a lot of work, no doubt. But we're developing it rapidly, and have made much progress.
The biggest challenge is that Slash itself doesn't separate content from presentation from business logic. To change one set of tags you may have to rewrite a template, change a database variable, write some Perl, or a combination. This isn't a knock on Slash -- it's very powerful and I enjoy using it -- it's just that the presentation layer hasn't been their focus.
The end-goal for this project, Slash-wise, is to have a fully XHTML/CSS compliant theme that people can easily use on their sites.
If you want more information about it, send me email at randall -at- sonofhans.net
[ FYI, I also posted this in the ALA discussion ].
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
is that the default comment view (i.e., when you don't have an account) is non-threaded, oldest first. Which is just stupid. People visiting are treated to pages of whatever the current first-post troll is these days.
Switch the default to threaded, highest scores first, and then if a visitor wants a more chaotic view, they can deliberately ask for it.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
No, no, no. You've got it all wrong.
It's "Never pet a flaming cat."
And it is the standard response when anybody asks for a tip (either kind) or insightful advise.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
that was mostly there for stylistic reasons. I should note that my site does use absolute pixel values. And I think that's ok to be honest. In my mind, the w3 spec is broken. Font size should increase along with all other sizes, like image size and the whole page. Like how opera resizes. It's a broken standard. In my opinion, one should work with it as much as the userbase will allow. Normally, the CSS font sizes don't bother me. For instance, ALA's website works fine. But with the tight borders on their slashdot repro site. It just breaks. Flash really is a better solution in a lot of ways. Ease of design. Ease of design reproduction. Ease of defining semantic values (flash does allow this!). I should really have chosen it but whatever, it works.
Photos.
I would be nice to have dynamic threads like the dynamic-feature at http://www.kuro5hin.org.
It's nice to just reload the threads you want to read and i think it saves some bandwidth.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.
Why would it be a hot news item, it's about the future os Slashdot for god's sake...
grow the fuck up already and call yourself something respectable, would you, fatass?
Heh, You are telling him to call himself something respectable, and you are called Alex_Ant?
Haha.
That was pretty eye-opening for me, thanks for posting the link, cioxx.
...
Now to revisit my crappy old html
I haven't looked at slashcode, but the reputation is that (1) Can't really change the HTML and (2) Can't change the database. It probably would be better to start over.
About time. Jazilla can't renderer even one bit of /., because several td tags a broken, and our HTML parser ( JTidy ) can't be bothered fixing them up.
I use the 'large' font setting in Internet Explorer 6 so I can read the text a distance from the screen. In the original example page, the fonts size is correct. In the 'final example' the font size of the article text on the front page is WAY TOO LARGE, although the text is the correct size when an article is actually viewed.
Why is the article text on the new page so much larger than the original example with large font settings?
I've been browsing slashdot for years (since 1998). During the last year I've been doing this with various builds of firebird (currently using 0.7). I've never noticed rendering problems with slashdot.
Jilles
I think the point is to reduce the amount of slashdot-effect on unwitting websites, not to increase the useability of slashdot.
This new slashdot looks ugly in text mode browsers like 'w3m' and 'links'. There should be a 'skin' that I can set to exclude all the crappy columns and just give me the stories.
IAWTP
It looks to me like Malda asked these guys to submit patches, they did all the work of making the HTML standards compliant, and now they're withholding the patches. They're asking for some people to submit the patches... why don't they just do it themselves?
Will it help redflag dupes ?
Following your identical post on ALA the following reply from Marshall Roch
Everything mentioned in these comments are fixable, including Andrew's "CSS tables."
Have a look at http://projects.exclupen.com/slashdot/ (does not work well in IE, but that is fixable if there is interest)
I'm also willing to help get /. up to speed. Where's the best place for interested parties to discuss this further? Please post replies on the ALA forum.
-- thinkyhead software and media
I wasn't familiar with the handheld media.
...it's not of any use to me. When I need to get my Slashdot fix at work and I'm using ssh to connect to my server at home, I browse /. with Lynx. It's the only way to go for low bandwidth remote web browsing.
Un-news
I believe that Konqueror DOES include application/xhtml+xml in its Accept header, but it processes the document using the HTML parser rather than a proper XML parser.
:(
Also, I seem to remember reading application/xhtml+xml pages just fine in Opera.
I used to serve all pages on my site as pure XHTML 1.1, with the correct MIME type and everything, until I realized that I'm one of three people I know who uses a non-IE browser.
You can't really hate Microsoft until you've gotten serious about standards. Then their arrogance shines through.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
how about /. in HTML 1.0? that should be fast!
Looking at this guy's work makes me wonder what exactly the /. maintainers have been doing for the last 3+ years. I'm sure they're busy and all, but as far as actually finding information for the site, they have to look a lot less - it all comes to them, nowadays, as opposed to the beginning where they found a lot of it themselves. (Which, IMO, was more interesting than a lot of the psuedo-politics and business garbage that have been seen in the last year or so...News for Nerds, right?)
I'm sure I'll be modded down for this or have the message completely removed, but it seems to me as if Taco and his gang have been negligent with their jobs. Think how much money they could be saving OSDN by simply doing a little extra work!
On the other hand, I wonder why this guy didn't approach OSDN and offer to sell them this design/interface overhaul. At even $3,000, it would be something that would be a 'wise business choice', even if they coudl get it done for less elsewhere.
As far as the design goes... I wonder what effect it would have on system load and memory use. More? Less? I'd wager less, but that's just my ignorant guess.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I agree given that information. I never did pay too much attention to the Times and WSJ, but could always identify them quickly enough through the changes. Clearly they did the right thing in that I really did not notice much.
Looking forward to faster page loads in either case. Maybe the resulting savings will make the site easier on OSDN...
Blogging because I can...
I do want things to consume less bandwidth because that is the right thing to do. I was referring to cosmetic changes and those of style. Too many of those and things could go sour.
/. all trendy and disgusting...
The other reply to my post indicated this works if done incrementally. That is likely the way to go. For a moment, I envisioned the "new and improved"
Blogging because I can...
Do the bandwidth saving maths examples include the fact that slashdot uses mod_gzip?
I hope they implement ASAP.
But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code? For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing.
A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.
The way I have planned to do this on one of my sites, is to make sure that every time somebody clicks "Preview" or "Submit", the post is handled to Tidy for sanity checks and conversion. By using preview, you can correct you're code, but you can never submit something that isn't well-formed.
I'm using Perl too, not Slashcode, but AxKit. Nevertheless, a good Perl implementation of Tidy is still lacking. There is a HTML::Tidy project page on Sourceforge, but it hasn't really gotten off the ground.
Does anybody else want to work on this, or do you have other ideas for cleaning up posts?
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
If it ain't broke, DON'T FIX IT!
Who's "god" ??
You parent's gone! *Confused*. *Files bug*.
Actually, you'll have to go back to stuff like Internet Explorer 1.5 and the like to find a browser that doesn't support the basics.
And for the record, PNGs are always smaller, except in a few very special cases which doesn't matter because the absolute size difference is next to nothing in those.
And yes, the PNG-writer in Adobe products is fucking broken last time I checked, and to top it off, many "webdesigners" doesn't understand that PNG supports truecolor, so they'll happily compare their paletted GIF and their GIF saved RGBA and explain the size difference not with "I'm an idiot" but "PNG sucks".
And as for animation.. that's a feature! Personally, I have animated GIFs disabled -- always -- but if you really want to animate pictures you'll use MNG which is animations made out of PNG-images
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I think that this is a welcome wake up call. However, I am more than sceptical about the three figure savings. But still, if it takes the combined power of a squadron of nuclear penguins to generate a slashdot page, I really think that it is time for an upgrade (and a rest for the squad).
http://www.uwplatt.edu/~web/webstandards/slashdot/ INDEX2.HTML
I actually like the look of Slashdot here. Others have said that it looks terrible but I actually like it! I hope Slashdot is revamped and cleaned up, and I especially hope that we have the opportunity to choose whatever CSS we want - so I can get it to look like that.
Would Slashdot itself actually have to be totally shut down in order to revamp it, or is it just a matter of modifying the Slashcode and restarting the Web server?
SCREW THE ADS! http://adblock.mozdev.org/ Proud user of teh Fox of Fire - Registered Linux User #289618
I save out the front page with images. There was only 19259 in images (no ad) but after a round of 'gif2png -nsO' and 'pngcrush -brute -rem tEXt' we were down 2K to 17006. So with no effort we have a 2K shave of the front page.
It'd be interesting to multiply those savings with the number of images downloads per month.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
If it did, you could just change a few html template files and bingo, site upgraded...
I thought all large web-apps used templating, it was about the first thing I learnt howto do when making them.
Seperate the presentation from the logic!
I am. Vint Cerf -- God of teh internet, bitches.
about google's reworking of the page: did you look at the source? still a mix of css in the header, inline css, and attributes for certain tags.
/. serve pages faster to more people is a Good Thing (tm).
still far from elegant (and efficient ?), and with such a simple layout... but i guess they have good reasons. maybe it's a compromise between page size and standards compliance/elegance.
on topic: i agree completely with your view on the "/. CSS-ing" initiative. anything that makes
And if you want more information about the Openflows Strict theme, send me email at peter -at- openflows.org :)
There's no layout in NS4.7 - it looks quite crappy. I know life would be so much better without NS4.XX, but it's still a fact of life in a lot of corporate settings.
My suggestion would be to display the headlines first at the top, and the slashboxes after, in the no-layout version, I think it would render it a bit more useful.
The other problem is that for increased font size, the text starts overlapping other columns... not that big a deal for me.
Despite these problems I still hope Slashdot would adopt it.
concerning ugly colors and waste of bandwidth, slashdot already has a decent solution for that: go to your user page, click "preferences", go to "Customize Slashdot's Display" and enable "Light (reduce the complexity of Slashdot's HTML for AvantGo, Lynx, or slow connections)".
i really support the retooling, but until then, i stick to "light display".... much better interfaces to the slashdot thread engine and its database.
Why does it *have* to be that we use a 'web browser' to read these objects?
Anyone done anything with the database which pushes the edge of interface design in interesting ways, such as giving us alternative views of threads, more flexible display options, etc?
Some sort of 'xfm'-like view of slashdot would be nice. Visualization for prime-time.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
As he states in the article, the new version displays much better in PDAs (IE on Pocket PC, anyway). It's actually completely readable, with no horizontal scrollbars. More than readable; it even looks good. Even readable is more than you can say for most sites. It would be great to be able to read Slashdot on my PDA, if this change is taken on.
I've occasionally read Slashdot on my Tungsten T in a micro browser. Its readable, but somewhat painful. Would this new design help that at all (I'll have to try it). More importantly, it would be nice if slashdot had a WAP site for PDA users.
Is that all? Surely it's more than that. Matt Drudge's site had 183,894,342 in the last month. If so, then slashdot has a long way to go. I've seen sites that Matt links to go down as fast as any slashdot effect.
Before you guys at Slashdot consider going to a full CSS design, you should really think twice.
$3,650 USD! Are you really going to save that much per year. First, you have so much bandwidth that you already paid for, you most likely will not be able to drop down to the next level.
Second, the CSS example was only the home page...what about all the other pages?
Third, bandwidth is getting cheaper and what is the real R.O.I. for this change? And is anyone going to really have time to read huge articles on their PDA, not to mention getting EYE strain while you are reading it.
Fourth, the bandwidth saving stated should be PROVEN to work on different browswers. CSS-P needs a LOT of workarounds to get this all done just for a single browser. So by the time you get it all to work, the bandwidth saving are mute.
Here is a link you should look at
TABLES VERSUS FULL CSS INTEGRATION
(i.e. replacing all those table tags with div tags and CSS positioning)
The real slashdot doesn't render particularly well at all with Firebird for me.
Consider using the "lite" version of slashdot. It works fine, and is much easier on the eyes as well.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
We went further about a year ago: we converted the Slashdot look to an all XML+CSS based layout. Look for it at BlogDot where you can actually create your Slashdot-alike blog and edit its layout (its CSS) using a browser based Javascript tool.
C U!
-- Mario Valente
There are still plenty of companies and people who are using browsers such as Netscape 4.x. And agencies which use this as their baseline when developing a site.
I notice that the current Slashdot looks fine in NS 4.79 and looks completely messed up (sorry, I mean fails gracefully) with the CSS example due to it not supporting @import. Haven't checked on horrible monsters such as IE 4.5 on the Mac, but if experience is anything to go by, it probably chokes.
Interesting article, but how is this acceptable? Since all formatting is CSS based, it seems like you would have to do browser detection and serve up a separate version of the site since there doesn't seem to be any way to around this.
It would seem to me that if you were to go about this, you would use XML and do a XSLT for any devices you wanted (browser, PDA, mobile, WAP, whatever.), seeing as they usually require customisation anyway.
Otherwise, whilst Slashdot may not be 100% perfect HTML, it works. There's a reason why people (including agencies) use tables. Right or wrong, while there are still issues, they do -tend- to work.
Don't get me wrong, I can't wait for the day when we can stop supporting dinosaurs and start taking advantage of things like this.
Hows about YEARS in all article dates - on the odd occasion I've done a bit of historical digging it would have been nice to know what YEAR the article came from--expecially those that say things like "within the next year..."
AT&ROFLMAO
Thirty-six hundred dollars! Yeah. I said thirty six hundred.. hundred with an "H".
That was worringly erotic.
PS. Just ignore the rants on various Mozilla sites about how Opera's SSR is "nothing but CSS", as it is insignificant or useless. Sure, it might be a simple idea, but why didn't someone else come up with it first then? Also, just because an idea is simple doesn't mean that it's bad or useless. It is, in fact, a good idea, one which might finally kill off WAP (about time). Just had to get that off my chest...
Clever signature text goes here.
[...] they did all the work of making the HTML standards compliant, and now they're withholding the patches.
Exactly... They made the page standards compliant. That is, they took the HTML for a particular /. page, and then manually crunched it until the result was a standards-compliant XHTML/CSS page. By doing so, they showed that it is possible to implement /.'s layout in a standards-compliant way and could demonstrate the advantages that this would bring. Nowhere in the article do they say that they changed slash to generate that new markup.
Something to do with the way stories are posted.At the moment we only see articles which the editors approve.while this is a great system which eliminates most of the noise if there was a seperate page where all submissions could be seen and commented upon would be great.
Wanted : A Signature.
The example design uses way too many different font sizes and styles and could be made much cleaner and user friendly. The current slashdot design is alread pretty bad, but this is even worse.
no way i can come up with posts demonstrating my point of view. as they are exceptions, i gracefully acknowledge you found a useful compromise. it does depend on the treshold with which you browse (as said and agreed upon)
:)
/. posters as a reliable newssource? the bottleneck for the 'rookie journalist' would likely be in source verification as opposed to information retrieval i'd say!
;)
;) (e.g. open source community aroused by SCO lawsuit -> yep too many comments!)
:)
i know of (rare) posts that break the rules (the infamous +5 Troll comes to mind) but these are so amusing they should be visible
overall, i think i will stick with the old -> new sorting of posts, makes more sense to me (Nested at +2). i tend to remember things in a time-ordered manner, but of course, we're talking personal preference here.
the reason i replied to you is that i didn't understand what your problem with the representation of the posts is. i mean: would you rely on
hey, maybe i'm not critical enough to care
and of course: he can count the comments to see how much the geek community cares about a certain subject
PS. i think we're wandering a bit off-topic here
Slashdot is not really that old an application and has undergone several updates. Yet, it has become a legacy system, one that is still remarkably useful but whose tech has fallen far enough behind that it will start to require special skills to maintain. The owners (i.e., Taco) are not really that motivated to upgrade slashdot because the cost of any upgrade actually involves rewriting the system and far outweighs the identified incremental benefits ($3,650 in bandwidth per year != even one developer month of effort; source: the cited article).
The problem is that, even now, it sounds like the system is a bear to maintain. 800 boxes for lay-out!? Hence, the now slow rate of site change and adaptation (well, except for new annoying ways to display ads so people will subscribe).
This is exactly what happened with all those 40 year old COBOL apps that had to be changed for Y2K. Taco is cash-strapped now. Will he have $100 million in 20 years to totally revamp slashdot?
Helevius
The article suggests as a consequence of the CSS-based implementation that printer-friendly and handheld-friendly views would be available. Now that's surely going to be the killer argument for many of us. How much time would I save if I could read slashdot comfortably on the way to and from work? I'd get my life back finally after five years of being glued to my desk every evening...
> That being said, it should look the same on every browser, YMMV but to me it doesn't. Opera looks
> confused, IE looks the same, Konqueror and Galeon look as good as normal. One geek's opinion....
For me the page looks significantly worse in both Opera (my normal browser) and IE. In Opera, the font of the middle column is too big, making things look funny. In IE, the font of the middle column is too small, making it hard to read.
I have had a similar problem with Wired's website since they switched over to their new format as well.
Slashdot has never been a pretty site (pun not intended), but a site that has been about content, the whole content and nothing but the content. While huge numbers of tables have a way of eating bandwdth, the html 3.2 works on everything on the planet with the possible exception of Mr. Ozimba's Netscape 1. 419 browser in Nigeria, and it renders damn fast as well, and seems to be pretty much indestructible.
There are bound to be issues with the multitude of browsers available, each rendering even CSS 1.0 in their own inimitable style (pun intended), because what Mac IE5 considers as a box, and what Windows IE5 consider as decent box or text attribute sometimes tend to be entirely different things.
If it works don't break it, I think. Rather fix the search engine.
article.pl? Does this mean it's in Polish?
No, that means its Perl. Perl has $, @, and %, which could be made out as articles.
Will I retire or break 10K?
No, there nver was a parent. He wrote "Re: ..." probably to say "Regarding: ...".
One of the best reasons for change to this is the layout of the page on small screens. Use of lists and divs and real titles and so on gives products like the Nokia Access Mobilizer (ex Eizel) a much better chance to guess what is going on and reformat the page intelligently.
I am guessing since the new page example is standards compliant, that 90% of the browsers in the world will display Slashdot in a funny manner.?
Is the site unusable on JAWS or some such?
Yes. Slashdot's anti-bot measure requires new users to read printed text out of a GIF image and type it in a box. If you want to make an audio version of Humanconf, the Slashcode maintainers have told me that such patches are welcome.
Will I retire or break 10K?
There is a bug in XHTML Strict. The value attribute of the li element was removed, leaving no way to start an ordered list at any value other than 1 (or A). Using CSS in this case doesn't count because all XHTML pages should still carry the same information without CSS.
Will I retire or break 10K?
In English, schoolteachers recommend to capitalize significant words in titles of works. To determine whether a word is "significant," use the first rule that applies:
In French, the rule is that proper names are capitalized, and everything up to the end of the first noun phrase or verb phrase is capitalized as well.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The worst part is, in Mozilla 1.5, even with Proxomitron turned off, Slashdot renders with a number of noticible and mildly annoying bugs, specifically the center column with the news stories tends to get shifted left by 5-10 pixels, and sometimes the stories with comments display a complete mess.
CVS Dillo renders slashdot fine now, due to some changes to the parser.
# make clean sig
From the linked page in the parent post on XHTML 1.1 document conformance:
Recommended: yes. Required: not in all situations. The W3C specs are filled with compromises on implementation limitations; they don't often demand that developers fly in the face of established browsers to validate their code. And given that the vast majority of the browser population is the vastly broken IE, it seems an acceptable compromise to send UTF-8 encoded XHTML without an XML declaration.
I know this is Slashdot, so there's no requirement to read an article before posting, but I thought people might at least read their references before posting....
Is it just me, or is the entire 'semantic conversion' section wrong? I thought, semantically speaking, H1, H2, and etc. were supposed to create a hierarchy. I do not buy making the author an H2, dept. an H3, and 'Read More' an H4. The 'Read More' link is not "part of" the department -- it is equal to the dept.
/. effect, etc.) can mark their articles as such...
While looking to see if anyone else discussed this, I sure had to wade through a lot of the crap that is slashdot. Perhaps the site needs a checkbox so the minority of people who actually post something relevant (i.e., not about time warps, the
I use this all the time with Smarty output filters.
In development the filters are disabled, when it goes to production they strip white space and single line comments.
Combine that with Smarty caching and phpa and you get dynamic PHP pages that perform like static ones.
They aren't talking about changing the look, they're talking about changing the infrastructure of the page itself, without modifying the looks per se. The only thing that will change is the semantic correctness of the underlying code, and the efficiency of the delivery. I totally agree with your standpoint on the look of the page, but that isn't the issue here: it's about a more intelligent and updated implementation of the underlying HTML using CSS. Take a look for yourself underneath the hood of slashdot, it ain't that pretty!
Hello, I'm using Windows 3.11 because Linux totally blows as a desktop OS. This is not to say that I also have a linux machine only that it suffers frequent outages due to its horrible design. (It is about 100 times more likley to be in an unusable state than the windows 3.11 machine).
The proposed slashdot design DOES NOT RENDER CORRECTLY in Wetscrape 4.08. While it is still readable, its usability is greatly diminished...
I am quite dismayed that I'm being further ostricized from the general computing community. =(
Well, I don't know about this website, with with any browser discussion, there always seems to be that one person who states something like 'only x% of people use a browser other than [the one I checked my site it], so I didn't see the point in being cross-browser compatable'.
Well, if the average person visits 5 pages on your site, but those with a browser in which the site renders like crap bug out after the first page, looking at logs for percentages are completely useless. And the odds of them returning are significantly slimmer, which can significantly affect the logs further.
So, we have to ask ourselves -- are there blind people who want to read Slashdot, but have tried in the past, and decided it was useless, and gave up? Those people are more important to capture as an audience in the long run that those who muddle through. [But it's nice to help those who muddle through, as well]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
A redesign of Slashdot is way overdue, IMO. I like the prototype suggested, but have a quibble regarding lo-fi web clients.
When I load the current design in the Links text browser, the page renders with several secreens of page decoration (navigation links, etc) before the actual page content is reached -- specifically, the articles begin on page six when using a 90 column terminal window. The current design, on the other hand, is displayed by Links roughly the way it would appear in a graphical browser, with a top row of links, a column of links on the left hand side, and the bulk of the page taking 80% or so of the right side of the page -- the interesting stuff begins right on the first screen, just like graphical browsers. (The Lynx text browser behaves similarly, but doeesn't do as well with either version of the page.)
I'm not up on contemporary CSS/XHTML design techniques, but it seems to me that a good CSS design effectively divorces the rendered page from the arrangement of elements of the page in the HTML source itself. In other words, it seems like the HTML could be generated in such a way that the first portion of the <body> part of the page has minimal headers & navigation, followed immediately by the "meat" of the page -- the articles & comments on Slashdot, similar content on other sites -- and then the core content can be followed by all the page decoration stuff. This way, a modern browser will still arrange everything on the page in the proper way, but a low end browser like Links would be able to put the most relevant material first.
Alternatively, Links could just be patched to do minimal CSS layout, but that doesn't get around the issue of how to design the HTML itself -- it just patches it for a particular low end web client.)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
We can't do this! If we did, we wouldn't be hypocrits anymore.
What signature defines me as a person?
Hard coding styles and scripts into the page is totally un-idiomatic for XML, anyhow. You're trying to merge two totally unalike parseable languages inside one document. Jumping through hoops is to be expected.
YES, Slashdot should definitely be perfectly XHTML compliant. This has the following benefits
./ css
./ become compliant.
1) looks better
2) allows people to easily make custom
3) slashdot can have multiple css to choose from, especially for those of us blinded by games.slashdot.org. Also in Firebird users can switch between the different stylesheets with east
4) people can easily write XSLT stuffs to take slashdot and mix it up.
5) Maybe we can make an RSS that's a little bit better and more customizeable. Doesn't exactly have to do with it, but it's related somewhat.
Yes
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Yup. I also had problems with 0.7, and am back to 0.61.
Firebird is important. Browsers are an important window on the world. I would like to see more corporate sponsorship of open source. We need faster development.
Unless I missed something the bandwidth savings translate into a saving for SlashDot of a whole $4K. And some people even called that a whopping saving.
Wow! From a business justification perspective this would get laughed out of any room.
For a site like slashdot that serves 50M pages I know exactly why they didn't change, it costs too much people time to save so little money. The internal costs far far outweight the external costs.
But hey, maybe I missed something it the calculation...
Non illegemati carborundum est!
Overflow either chops off the text, lets it overflow, or makes it scrollable. It does not change area size.
Photos.
It still doesn't exhibit table like behavior. At least on my version of firebird (.6.1) it still lets the text overflow. And as covered earlier the overflow attrib does not address the problem
Photos.
It's just like slashdot, except it's ugly and it makes me want to hurt people.
And then there was E
Alter the CSS2 table spec so that table rows can be written out of order if necessary. I will not be held hostage for elegance of 'language'
Photos.
I'm not sure what this means about Taco's plan to rule the HTML universe.
If it isn't in IE it is useless. Therefore, it is irresponsible to use it. I know of the table spec but you cannot use this because IE does not support it.
Photos.
If you resize the browser to around 800 width in the css version, you notice some display problems with it. The icons for the current articles to the right of the Slashdot logo all pop up on top of the logo. There is also some distortion of the background color on the far left. Either the css needs to be rewritten or it just shows that some browsers still support the old style html better.
I saw the example new site and it uses smaller fonts. That alone should save a bunch in bandwidth costs!
(yes, Mildred, it's a joke)
-Tom
The company that owns Slashdot is unbelievably bad at marketing. I doubt they make much money. Anyone who knows more care to inform us?
I would love it if they implemented this on Slashdot very soon. The other night I wanted to write a quick app that downloads all the journal entries for a specific slashdot user, and found the non-compliant markup a bit of a headache. (Yes, slashdot has user journals! Probably more interesting than the front-page content, IMHO).
First of all, because slashdot HTML is different from other sites, there would have to be a bit of hard-coded stuff to deal with the funky HREFS.
Secondly, if the code itself was valid XHTML, that means I could use an XML parser to search the web page - rather than having to use cumbersome (and often outdated) HTML parsers.
Currently, whatever I created for parsing and saving slashdot journals is that would not be reusable with other journal sites - livejournal, blogspot and the other journal sites out there. (I'm trying to practice OO, so I'm avoiding writing a "one-shot" script).
BTW - Slashdot provides an RSS page for each user's journal - but only going back 15 entries or so. Otherwise, it would be the answer to my particular problem.
You can already do this on the client side with user CSS. Go into your /. preferences and enable the Light version, then use the following user stylesheet to skin the page:
r :white;background:#006666;m argin:0%;font-family:arial,sans-serif;}o on;}s erif;}
m ily: verdana,tahoma,"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;font-size:10px;margin:1em 3em;padding:3px}r if;font-size:9px;b order:thin solid #933;}
r gin:0%;font-family:arial,sans-serif;} /* headings. Formerly H2,H3 */
body{font-family:arial narrow,arial,sans-serif;}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{colo
h1 a,h2 a,h3 a,h4 a,h5 a,h6 a{color: #CCCCCC;}
ul,ol{border:thin solid gray}
li{margin:0;}
i,em,cite,dfn,var{color:mar
b,strong{color:navy;font-family:arial,sans-
tt{font-family: "Andale Mono", monospace;}
/* Small fonts */
blockquote{color:#300;background:#cdc;font-fa
img{font-family:verdana,sans-se
a[name] b{display:block;color:white;background:#006666;ma
a{text-decoration:none;border-bottom: thin solid blue;}
a:hover{color: navy;border-bottom: thin solid navy;}
td{background:#aaa;}
td + td{background:#bbb;}
dt{background: #CCCC99;}
I don't think that slashdot should switch to XML. They should switch to HTML transitional because they use UL for nested indentation. Also, the content should be at the top. They should remove all the tab characters as well.
People who know CSS well should be people who know good design, right? But it seems that they all like to show off their CSS skillz by putting dotted lines everywhere on the page. Like here, in their "second skin" example.
What is the obsession with dotted lines? They're ugly and distracting. It's nothing but a way to scream to the world "Hey look, I know CSS and I'm using it to make my page look worse! Go me!"
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
While you're at it, how about porting slash to work with apache2 and mod_perl2.
Apache2 is here, and it is getting to be the new standard, mod_perl2 is to a point where it is useable without too much risk.
I for one welcome our new Slashdot overlords!
Score: 5 Redundant
TT
That's because of the missing table tags and nonstandard margin tags. Slashdot has a lot of no-nos like class elements, failure to begin and end javascript properly...
/. was never even HTML 3.2 compliant. It's a godawful mess, which should come as no surprise if you're a perl coder and have seen slashcode.
Check it out.
Standards-compliant browsers display text too far to the left because that's exactly what the HTML is telling them to do.
I showed my wife (a non-techie) alternate layout page as I explained it to her and commented "oh, just like Livejournal."
They allow paying users to choose their own skins for their journal, and paying users even get to write their own stylesheets (albeit in the GNU S2 script, not CSS).
I bet if Slashdot offered some features like this they might get a few more subscribers.
/* Slashdot.org */
;
/* headings. Formerly H2,H3 */
body{font-family:arial narrow,arial,sans-serif;}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {
color:white;
background:#006666;
margin:0%;
font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
h1 a,h2 a,h3 a,h4 a,h5 a,h6 a{
color:#CCCCCC;}
ul,ol{border:thin solid gray}
li{margin:0;}
i,em,cite,dfn,var{
color:maroon;}
b,strong{color:navy;
font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
tt{font-family:" Andale Mono",monospace;}
/* Small fonts */
blockquote{color:#300;
background:#cdc;
font-family:verdana,tahoma,"Trebuchet MS",sans-serif;
font-size:10px;
margin:1em 3em;
padding:3px}
img{font-family:verdana,sans-serif
font-size:9px;
border:thin solid #933;}
a[name] b{display:block;
color:white;
background:#006666;
margin:0%;
font-family:arial,sans-serif;}
a{text-decoration:none;
border-bottom:thin solid blue;}
a:hover{color:navy;
border-bottom:thin solid navy;}
td{background:#aaa;}
td + td{background:#bbb;}
dt{background:#CCCC99;}
The name must stay though. And also, I really like the format of the site. No one minds an improved twin of the site if there is new technology to improve banwidth - the world can be slash dotted faster!. But I do hope there is no major new design change. People often cannot resist doing this. if a site is popular, don't change it's content and style ; )
> This isn't the first time this has happened. Remember when BBS's became popular
Ah, yes... the early 90s.
> Slashdot "integrated" one into their site to kill any competition?
What was their number? Were they a FidoNet node?
hm. after previewing this, I really get the feeling I should have some sort of crochety "when I was your age" quote in there somewhere. Humbug.
You forgot the trailing forwardslash
try:
http://slashdot.org/palm/
Incidentally, I had to remove slashdot from my AvantGo list because slashdot has "banned" either my ip or the AvantGo servers IP (I've read its the later).
Eventually, I will set up Plucker for a daily download...
HTML is not a semantic web technology! here's the W3C Semantic Web page. Notice how (X)HTML isn't mentioned?
i don't know who to blame for the propagation of this usage of the word 'semantic,' but i think it might be Jeffrey Zeldman. i like the dude, but this has to stop...
Just raise the taxes on crack.
It's good that Slashdot is looking for ways to lower its bandwidth requirements. Unfortunately, I don't like the style of the new design. Why is it that all "improved" website designs seem to consist of microscopic type scrunched into the middle of the page? Web browsers are designed to allow the browser's user to control the size of the type.This feature allows a wide range of visual acuity and a wide range of screen sizes to be accomodated by a website. The current /. design allows this. The new one does not appear to.
Slashdot has some occasional rendering problems with recent builds. At least it does for me and several others. Bug 217527 from bugzilla covers this. It doesn't seem to have been fixed yet.
It's rendered like this:
Thanksgiving turkey dinner for one. (score of 1)
by MAYORBOB at Thu 20 Nov 12:29pm (# 16 in reply to # 1)
From the following code:
On Plastic the title of the links is set to be the first bit of text in the comment. So when I mouse over the link to the comment I get a little tool-tip like box that pops up and gives the first chunk of the comment. In Mozilla I get a popup reading: ...
Boston Market. Seriously, you're right. It's not so much the food which, when you have
whereas IE shows the whole title text. Here on Slashdot though it's only showing up as plastic.com so I guess they set it automatically to the domain.
It's a small thing but it makes navigating a thread much easier when you can quickly gauge the tone/value of replies without having to click on them all to open them in another window. It works wonders with reading short replies, deciding which comments to investigate first and helps with often meaningless subject lines like "Re:The thing this thread started as but it no longers bears any relation to'. It's surprising how used you get to depending on that little bit of introductory info. I constantly mouse over the links in huge Slashdot threads and am surprised everytime when nothing happens.
So, my question now is, is there a reason Slashdot wouldn't want to adopt this idea? It really is a great nav-tool and interface enhancement I find. It's changed the way I read on Plastic, I now read many more of the comments to a story because I seldom get frustrated by chasing replies that are of no interest to me. It also lends itself to interesting idioms. Take this example of a post. Subject line is bold and the first line of the comment body (which'll show up in the popup and completes the 'thought') is in italics
You can get a pretty good idea of a comment with the amount of text available in the Subject and title tool-tip, especially when people try to write their comments with this fact in mind.Go over to Plastic and try following a few of the discussions in the stories there. I bet you'll see the appeal of this method. Of course, it's possible there's a really good reason we don't want to do this on Slashdot but I can't think of it right now.
Kevin
I'm an xhtml 'pusher' (I won't say zealot) and would love to use this as an opportunity to turn my half dozen perl script experience into a genuine skill with the language. But there's no way I could just dive in. I need somebody to lead, give me a manageable piece, explain the perl bits that are beyond me, etc.
So how do we go about organizing a group of developers to web-standardize slashcode? Who's in!?
Did I read that right? They expect to save /. $3650/yr?
OK, that's great if some volunteers want to fork over the code for nothing. Then it's free money, since Slashdot has upgrade cycles anyway, you'd just roll it into the next cycle.
OTOH, if they had developed it in-house they could have easily spent considerably more than that in developer salaray, so I can see why it wasn't done.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
In most well-designed typefaces, there is a certain amount of built-in space around punctuation glyphs, with the amounts chosen to match the other design characteristics of the characters to maximise reading ease. This gives you, amongst other things, a slightly wider space after a '.' (full stop/period) at the end of a sentence, which in turn gives a natural break while reading without being overly distracting. Note that in most typefaces, two full space characters after a full stop would give an excessively wide space, breaking the reading flow more than necessary, particularly where full justification is in use.
For the same reason, serious typography uses separate characters to represent full stops and (English) decimal place separators, and has another character for ellipses ('...'). If you used the normal full stop character singly as a decimal separator or thrice for ellipses, the spacing would be awkward.
Alas, this sort of detail is the bane of the typographer's life: they spend their days designing typefaces that are easy for you to read, without distracting artifacts, but most people will never appreciate the artistry involved, and only ever notice when they get it wrong.
Obviously, this can't apply when using a monospaced ("typewriter") typeface, because the designer doesn't have the luxury of fine-tuning the widths of characters. This partly explains why reading large blocks of text in a monospaced typeface is difficult for most people, and was also the reasoning behind using two full spaces in that context, although it's unnecessary with good proportionally spaced fonts.
If you'd like more information, you might try Microsoft's excellent Typography web site, or Donald Knuth's works on digital typography if you're really hardcore. There are excellent examples in each case of things that good typography will take into account to make for better readability, and of the distracting effects that can happen if you don't account for them. And as a bonus, once you've read Knuth, you'll know exactly how to typeset "e.g.," using TeX with perfect spacing. =:-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
my poor Netscape 4.8 on the school lab computers (default Browser for CS students at U of T) have immense problems rendering the new "retooled" page. Maybe they should cookie the retooled version versus the old version so those who can't appreciate it still have an option while still allowing bandwidth savings for those who can.
---- The geek shall inherit the Earth.
It's unfortunate that many of today's word processors, and the fonts on an average PC, haven't yet caught up with the field when it comes to typography. As a result, the "serious typography" conventions for use of characters don't always work, and some tweaking (such as adding a second space character after a full stop) can improve the appearance.
One of these days, someone will produce a WP+typefaces combination that actually does render well on a desktop; we've had smart quotes and automatic ellipses for years, but no-one's yet done character ligatures (fi and such) properly in a WP. Worse, kerning and hyphenation algorithms are usually very poor. Finally, with a few notable exceptions, most fonts supplied with a Windows/MacOS/*nix box aren't very well designed, and don't reach the design standards that a serious typographer would demand in terms of spacing and range of characters.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
As far as an ol starting at something other than 1--such as ten (and possibly counting down), I really don't know
This is a bug in the Strict specifications. W3C mistakenly deprecated the value attribute of the li element in HTML 4 and carried the mistake through to XHTML 1.0. That's why I'm sticking with Transitional DTDs, where the attribute is still present (though deprecated). I'm sending HTML 4+CSS rather than XHTML+CSS to the client because IE can't read XHTML, and HTML is different enough from XHTML to make writing a document that's valid in both languages nearly impossible, especially with the script/style escaping issue and the SGML SHORTTAG issue.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I always thought the best improvement /. could make would be to incorporate a navigational sidebar for comments, of the type Google uses when you do a Google Groups search. That's a very useful and intuitive interface IMHO.
This kind of thing is supposed to be done with CSS, so why not campaign the browser makers to do it with CSS? Don't show it to the user, but have that "default font" rule create font-family rules in the user CSS.
Based off of scoop about 6 months ago.. it's compatible with the scoop db, but not nearly as fully featured as k5 currently. Just in case anyone passing through is working on such a thing.
I'll be posting it to scoop.k5.rg once 1.0 is ready.
That's what this page has been saying all along.
d Templates/TablesOrLayers.aspx
Tables versus Full CSS Integration
http://www.decloak.com/Products/Dreamweaver/Neste
(i.e. replacing all tags with tags and CSS positioning)
Have you ever heard the old saying (usually used as a slight against Python programmers) that "friends don't let friends use whitespace as punctuation"? What are you going to do when your beautifully crafted script that searches for a double space runs into text produced in the other style? Or an occasion where someone just miskeyed and entered only one space? Don't code for idealism, code for reality.
As I pointed out in my post on current word processors, it's unfortunate that the state of the art on typical desktop WP software is nowhere near the standards of serious typesetting/typography. If the few fonts distributed with Windows, MacOS, etc. were set up well (and, in fairness, they are getting better) then WP software could produce the same quality of output.
Moreover, setting up an automatic change from .[sp][sp] to .[sp] on-the-fly isn't exactly difficult, and similar things are already done by programs like Microsoft Word to convert en- and em-dashes, ellipses, etc. You could even have an option to ignore double spaces after punctuation to ensure consistency; if memory serves, some programs already have this, though I can't remember which ones off the top of my head.
As has been noted by many commentators on the subject, you can't look at this in isolation, because which you prefer depends on personal experience and your own accepted norms at that point. If you look at Knuth's Computer Modern fonts in isolation, a lot of people find them overly "light". However, a lot of the same people seem to find them easier to read for several pages of academic paper, and set their own papers in that face rather than something heavier.
To demonstrate the personal preference further, to me the spacing of your first version (with a single space) is clearer. This is probably because the visible spacing isn't the same in the two cases; you should be comparing the space between the right of the "g" and the left of the "N" with the spacing from the right of the "e" to the left of the "t", since these are the whitespace areas that the human eye will perceive when scanning the text.
The big point is that if, instead of taking a specific "benchmark", you just sit people down and watch how fast and accurately they read extended pieces of text in the two versions, AFAIK no-one has ever found that a wider spacing gives a readability advantage. Since typography is all about making things easier to read, there's not much argument for double-spacing there.
Sorry, we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I find none of your three arguments (parsing, state of current WP software, readability) to be particularly compelling. On the contrary, if anything, the latter two argue for single-spacing and the other doesn't care.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
What does <ECODE> do, anyway? I've never managed to work it out...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I typically enclose quotations in both <blockquote> and <i> as seen above. Are the <p> tags strictly necessary there? I always thought a block quote was free-standing, though it's possible that either I've just always been wrong or the behaviour's been changed by the more formal specs for later (X)HTML revisions...
(I don't find the extra typing slows me down much when posting, BTW.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
It probably just depends on which style guide your editor uses. For example, both newspapers in my town ( The News-Sentinel and The Journal Gazette ) capitalize only the first word and the proper nouns in headlines, and they capitalize book titles the way their publishers said to in press releases.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I typically send pages with the DTD claiming XHTML strict.
Do you send them with Content-type: application/xhtml+xml as the specs seem to recommend? IE seems to use an HTML 4 (not XHTML) parser for anything sent with Content-type: text/html. For XHTML documents sent as application/xml or text/xml, IE just displays a parse tree because it can't seem to pick up on <link rel="stylesheet"> in HTML space. For XHTML documents sent as application/xhtml+xml, IE FAILS IT!
No, I'm not yet far enough along in web development to know how to get my virtual host to sniff for whether a user agent can parse conforming XHTML.
Will I retire or break 10K?
5 being the limit on Indo-European cases
Sure, Germanic may have had five cases (nom, acc, dat, gen, and ins). But didn't Latin have six (nom, acc, dat, gen, voc, and abl) and Sanskrit eight (Latin's plus loc and ins)? Don't some Slavic languages still have seven cases? Aren't those all Indo-European? (I can't very well call it IE because in the context of a web standards discussion, IE refers to the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser.)
Will I retire or break 10K?
... EVERYTHING scales on the current slashdot design - on they site they link to everything does (though much does) -
As someone might know, the world (give or take a few) uses MSIE and MSIE does not allow the user to scale a stylesheet fontsize if that size has been specified as ABSOLUTE - too many hack sites are designed this way.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
The popularity of /. is not an issue so what's to prove by changing the look? Gain new users? Have more impact?
How about just to make the site more pleasing to its existing readers? No need to "prove" anything.
Slashcode does indeed use templates, based on the Template Toolkit Perl module. It's actually quite slick.
There's a web-based interface to edit the templates which, IMHO, is a bit less slick, but it works.
(I commercially hosted Slashcode sites for a couple years.)
And indeed, I did exactly that once for a site -- changed a few templates and the resulting site was reasonably standards compliant. Wasn't hard at all. Why Taco hasn't done it here yet is way beyond my comprehension.
By grouping things semantically, you make it much easier for things like screen readers to work.
Yay me!
Use the 'em' as a size unit - it works out as the size of one glyph in your current font. I think. Means spaces are all proportional.
Yay me!
...the penis-enlargement pills finally worked.
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Well so why doesn't it accept them??
I hope the new version finally is 8-bit clean. This is the 21st century!! Why would we still have to suffer limits imposed by narrow-minded Anglo-saxon-centric engineers who decided last century that 7 bits were enough?
But before starting a rant, maybe I should check that new version out?
How about a rewrite which specifies "charset=UTF-8" and, as an aside, actually permits posters to use it? Now that would be worth doing.
It would certainly be time to accept accented characters. But whether it should be UTF-8 or Latin-1 is debatable:
Many browsers/systems don't accept UTF-8 yet, but all seem to accept Latin-1 (iso-8859-1).
Are the additional characters of the UTF-8 set really needed?
The choice would seem to be:
- allow all characters, but a significant minority will get (readable but ugly) garbage in place of special characters
or
- allow Latin-1, which everybody will see correctly, but which excludes display of all Asian and Cyrillic languages, as well as Greek and some characters for a few other Latin-based languages.
(For those of you who may not know: Latin-1 covers at least Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian. It may also cover Scandinavian languages?)
Whatever the choice made, it would be better than the current 7-bit stupidity.
Replace "consonant" with "consonant sound", and yerricde's rules become more exact, covering "an hour" and "a unit".
"an historic event" is wrong wrong wrong.
In American English. But some dialects drop unaccented initial 'h', and speakers pronounce "historic" as if it were "istoric". Notice that this can happen without necessarily turning "history" into "istory" as in Cockney.
But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code? For example, to do [quoting] properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing. A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.
/.'s current nested comment mode.
The probable reason blockquote requires nested paragraphs in strict mode is because<BR> is frowned upon. However, Blockquote and DIV nested Paragraphs create margin problems in many browsers. Additionally, <UL> is not permitted for indentation of content as seen in
Using XHTML strict is not practical and would create non-backward compatible pages. HTML 4.01 transitional is practical because these unreasonable expectations are absent. The #1 priority is not that a page validate, but that it's usable.
I've converted slashdot pages to CSS a few times in the past, and would love to help in this project, but have no idea how templates or slashcode works. Very little need be done to create slimmer pages on slashdot. By simply adding a linked stylesheet to the head of the "Light" version of slashdot found under preferences, one can make slashdot look really sleek without even touching slashcode templates. See my earlier comment for a user stylesheet to do this now.
Wouldn't GNU/Linux be better? ;)
I've read Grocklaw. BoycottNovell, you're no Grocklaw
It's extremely easy to take a front page from slashdot and/or slashcode and css-iffie it.
:(
:)
Infact, that's what 95% of the modified slash site are, imho.
However, to do a full conversion to one of the upper modes of CSS/xhtml/etc etc, its a shitton of work. I know. I started doing it. Keeping up with the template changes, working the changes back into the new templates, testing, committing it... its a lot work.
These people did _not_ do that. I'm not really impressed with what they're showing everyone.
I am impressed with the attention it's seemingly received. There's been two people who've started doing this and both are publically available. There have been many many requests for it over the past 2 years on slashcode and the slashcode list serves... and now it seems ALA comes in and OSDN's calling for help?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding something about the situation or how it's come about. I don't know.
It always seems like we've got many people wanting, but few step up to signup for a portion of work.
Opensource, ya gotta love it
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
Nice asshole sarcastic email in the article. The article author didn't even catch on. Anyway anyone that wants to do this as Taco says "Have fun". Submit your patches dumbasses and Taco will shit on them.
I've had huge problems with Slashdot using Firebird 0.7 (and 0.6). The left panel often doesn't line up with the main content, sometimes they overlap which looks like a total mess. Many many times I do a preview or submit of a message and I get a page with the left panel, but not the main content. But then I go read the HTML and see that all the text is there, it just didn't render correctly.
I've notice a lot of problems like this after they redid the left panel.
Very strange behavior. I haven't really noticed anything strange like this on any other sites I visit.
#!/
It is obvious that Slashdot was just planning to break the HTML standard to force everyone to use Slashdot's "integrated" browser, Mozilla.
I disagree here, considering how poorly Slashdot has rendered with recent versions of Mozilla and Firebird. I've had huge problems, to the point where I'm hitting reload 10 times just to get a message to post properly.
Personally, I think Slashdot is paid by Microsoft to break compatibility with Mozilla/Firebird. But I haven't browsed Slashdot with IE to confirm this conspiracy theory. However, I can at least point to all the Microsoft ads we see on Slashdot all the time. They probably charge Microsoft a little extra in exchange for little "tweaks" to the HTML here and there. Meanwhile, the Slashdot staff is using Safari (or IE?) on OS X so it renders fine for them.
Even as I preview this message in Firebird, the left panel is overlapping with the main content. It looks like a total mess. I'm going to hit submit and hope that it actually displays the message I just submitting, so that I know it actually submitted.
#!/
Obviously, for a demonstration meant to be perused by Slashdotters, indentation is a good thing. But I think for the real Slashdot servers, the 4% bandwidth savings might be a good idea.
Litigious bastards
This is a BIG problem, the /. search is basically useless. I've had cases where I could remember 3-4 words in the title of the story but I still couldn't manage to get /. to find it.
Agreed. It's pretty lousy in 768x1024 as well (that's not a typo; portrait mode is actually quite nice for some uses), big horizontal stripes of wasted space above and below.
It's actually kind of sad how many pages turn out worse in portrait mode; you'd think it'd naturally be a better orientation. So many sites, though, now rely on sidebars and such that you end up with either a lot of skinny columns or horizontal scrollbars.
::Using XHTML strict is not practical and would create non-backward compatible pages. HTML 4.01 transitional is practical because these unreasonable expectations are absent.
I must respectfully disagree. I think that the only things that are hard to do backwards-compatible with Strict are crap anyway.
What's crap about using <UL> for nested view? <UL> is widely supported, and I'm not talking exclusively about old browsers like netscape 3. Dillio and other new browsers that don't support CSS render "compliant" pages as garbage.
For those who want to use and old browser, a black-on-grey page will meet their need perfectly well.
Compliant != Accessibility. When did this term accessibility get bastardized into meaning inaccessible? Putting blockquotes inside <BLOCKQUOTE> makes it accessible. Putting paragraphs inside those blockquotes is not accessibility, you're just being pedantic because the W3C frowns upon <BR>. And providing web pages to people in one huge chunk of black and gray is not accessibility. It's monotonous and un easy to read. Coding anal-retentively simply so that someone browsing in Dillio can view garbage is not advantageous, it's stupidity. Otherwise we'd be browsing in NotePad.
Besides, Transitional was termed Transitional in 1997. It is time to move on now. Six years with no evolution is far too long.
Yes, lets move on to the latest technology before it's even supported just so we can be pretentious. In the mean time, we can cross our fingers in the hopes that someday in the future someone will actually make a browser that will read slashdot, making our efforts fruitful.
Until then, I'll continue using blockquotes without <P>, and where paragraphs needed, I'll use <BR> because blockquote already has a margin. <P> only complicates the box margin of the blockquote and its adjacent boxes, is redundant, and just plain stupid.
This so called crap, (as you call it for no other reason than that you're a fanatic,) was invented by the W3C. Now they're trying to fix their mistakes by building crap on top of crap. Suddenly blockquote is no longer for text, but rather it's just a container for <P> tags. End result: Crap! In ten years from now you'll call it crap too. But that crap, like <BR>, <UL>, <I> and <B> are widely supported and always will be. They still serve a deserving place in message boards and forums. The W3C should have got these self-proclaimed mistakes right the first time, but they didn't so everyone has to live with their so-called mistakes.
<BR>, <B>, and <I> are also old, but they're practical on a message board and supported by all browsers. Coding web pages is one thing, coding messages is another. Slashdot is not a sophisticated HTML architect for your comments, nor need it be. Transitional gives the most flexibility for the types of comments that people will be posting here. Slashdot can still be enhanced with CSS, updated, and streamlined, and it would be smaller than if converted entirely to XHTML strict.
I usually experience that on sites that have table-layouts.
Hopefully they're working on it, but I usually just curse the site for using tables.