Slashdot Mirror
Help Beta Test Slashdot CSS
After almost 8 years, Slashdot's HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS. Slashdot itself will migrate in the next few weeks, but for now, we'd appreciate it if people who understand CSS could take a look at Slashcode. If you use a browser that lets you select a stylesheet, you can take a look at that site with the Slashdot CSS Skin. Keep in mind that Slashcode doesn't look exactly like Slashdot, so there will be some differences between that site, and the final version that will appear on Slashdot. We're mainly looking for feedback on compatibility issues and blatant bugs. You can use our our SF bug tracker to submit bug reports. Thanks for your help. Once we move Slashdot, work will begin on a new look & feel. If you have ideas, you could start playing with the CSS stylesheets now!
After almost 8 years, Slashdot's HTML is finally getting an overhaul.
What is a HTML?
If you do change to CSS beware as some CSS is IE specific, like list trees.
Just about every site remodel has problems. I have just gone over the list of things I have issues with on our local public school's new website. Most of my comments have to do with broken capabilites. I'm sure that the folks at /. have tested this system in a non-production environment, but things are bound to go wrong at first. The unfortunate thing about my local school district's website has been access. How much of the /. staff resources are going to be committed to the rollout and how soon are problems going to be addressed?
Considering the fact that it took nearly two minutes for the form to arrive makes me think we are in for a bumpy ride!
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
CmdrTaco? I have exactly two words for you.
:-)
This. Rocks.
Kudos on finally bringing Slashcode into the 21st century! The Slashdot style over on Slashcode looks absolutely wonderful, with none of the chunky layout problems that plague Slashdot itself! What I'd love to know is, how much bandwidth are you saving by using CSS? Many of the experiments done to date suggest that you could cut your bandwith usage by 30-50%! Will this update usher in a new era of faster page loading? Inquiring minds want to know!
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
for things like collapsing articles to header only and expanding them to full article? (And user options for the initial view)
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Is there a separate user database for slashcode? Logon doesn't seem to work and even a "send my password" doesn't recognize the login id. Perhaps this is just a Beta/Test issue, but it would be nice to test with real-world configurations and customizations.
from the oh-my-god-it's-actually-happening dept.
You can say that again.
You probably shouldn't click this.
Slashdot going to CSS? Has hell frozen over!? Windows gone GPL!? What's next?
Just curious -- not attacking or anything -- but why HTML 4 as opposed to XHTML 1 Strict? Is it because of the content type issues with a certain browser, strict XML compliance was too difficult, or simply that only purists ever seem to care? ;-)
It's good to see that you're moving on to something more modern. HTML 3.2 is very antiquated and isn't CSS friendly. It would more work to move to XHTML 1.0 Transitional but I would think that it would pay off big dividends in the future.
After almost 8 years, Slashdot's HTML is finally getting an overhaul.
I'm more surprised that after 8 years, slashdot is testing something on a machine that isn't the main server.
Seriously, while you guys are changing things, how about changing it so ALL code changes go through regression testing along with some major user testing before you drop ut into the production servers. We all dislike 503s, and we have see a TON of bugs pop up (like last weeks 'unable to see comments' for several hours).
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is this in response to that big story last year where someone actually redid Slashdot's main page in CSS to show just how easy it would be to do? Kind of funny in a way because people who usually want to prove how easy something is to accomplish have no idea of just how much glue sits behind the scenes. That's usually what makes these kinds of changes so difficult and fraught with rendering errors, coding slips and the like. Even moreso when you only have a handful of decent people working on the system and a ton of mediocre people making up the majority of the development team. When it comes to systems this big and complicated, it's a wonder they work at all. So who will be making these CSS changes?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
No, the new site design is just a blank gray window with a never-ending browser status animation culminating in a message box that says "Host unavailable". I bet that only took three lines of CSS code.
-William Brendel
Hi, could everyone stop clicking on the link for a minute so I can open it, thanks.
This has already been done, about two years ago. See http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot2/ and particularly http://www.uwplatt.edu/web/webstandards/slashdot.h tml
Moderate drunk! It's more fun that way!
Um, because:
Of course I know what HTML is. I was trying to be funny (appearently wasted effort). The joke is that HTML is old. For slashdot to only be using HTML makes it old. Something so old that people forgot about it.
Oh nevermind.
Damn,
It's getting cold down here.
- Satan
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
"I just want to be able to read articles and comments. Period."
Sure.
But blind / partially sighted / physically disabled folks want to read articles and comments too. Period.
And CSS helps make websites more accessible.
The more advanced the technology, the more open it is to primitive attack
My bet is that they rewrote slash in Ruby on Rails, and as a result it actually takes negative storage space. slashcode isnt realy slashdotted, the extra hard drives that are popping out of that server have knocked out the ethernet line....
I tried this and it seems to be kicking out quite a few duplicate stories. Is that normal?
Johnkoerner.com
seriously though, this is a good thing, hopefully this will allow for user-chosen themes, etc. and way to get http://it.slashdot.org/ to not look like baby poo.
finally, being as /. is such a tech site, it's about time to bring things into this century. Hell, I rework my site constantly, I still can't believe /. went so long with old/outdated/non-validated code. perhaps it could be a quarterly thing to update things in the future.
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
Who cares? Three main groups:
People with disabilities prefer CSS because it allows them to trivally alter layout and visual presentation in a way that works for them. For example, some people have trouble seeing low-contrast presentations; they can insert their own CSS into a CSS-aware page to make any site readable.
The folks who pay for the bandwidth tend to like CSS because it costs less to serve (properly implemented, that is). CSS separates style from content, so the style can be cached while smaller content pages are tranferred on request. This makes a better end-user experience and costs less to provide.
Developers and designers like CSS because it follows the excellent practice of separating view from data. It's easier for a developer to make changes to the underlying code because they worry less about breaking the view; likewise, a designer can make layout tweaks without affecting other areas of code. Clean separation makes fewer bugs.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Here's one explanation, from CmdrTaco's Journal:
"Pudge has been working a lot on that problem. Specifically we've got scripts to fix HTML in all editor & user contributed content spaces. A lot of this is under way already. Old comments are being automatically fixed in the background. HTML in articles from 1998 is being corrected. Scripts are working very hard. And in some cases, tired editors have been re-reading stories from 1998 to correct HTML errors that boggle the mind. None of this is perfect, so don't be to surprised if you find something wonky. Feel free to mail me URLs if you see it. We've got almost 60,000 articles, 900,000 users, and like 13 million comments. There will be mistakes."
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
Allow me to list people who would be denied the goodness of slashdot if you didn't create something that allowed IE to be compatible:
1) People who for some stupid reason or another can only use IE at work and don't have enough control of their PC to install something better.
2) Geeks and nerds who do not fall into the category of computer nerd. There are science geeks, english geeks, political geeks, math geeks, but just because one is a geek about one thing doesn't mean they are geek about computers.
I'm all for scolding IE for not complying to standards, but since MS's philosophy of embrace, extend and extinguish is still in use in IE, don't allow yourself to be extinguished by designing a page that doesn't work around I.E. bugs and cut off major portions of your audience.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Y'know, that's a great idea, why target what is most prevalent on the Internet when one can target for some superior solution which NOBODY has completely implemented.
I guess next articles for you are:
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive.
Welcome to 2005.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
Add to that the fact that Slashdot is moving to css, Apple using Intel, Apple Shipping 2 Button Mice, Debian 3.1 was released and this year seems to be turning into be the pivotal point for hell to hold the winter olympics.
[alk]
I kid, I kid.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
Got it finally: http://greasemonkeyed.com/tag/slashdot
IMarv
Trusting software vendors is no smarter than trus
An (almost) comrehnsive list of greasemonke\slashdot user scripts.:c ific#head-ec4846dd1f06f8efd2d256a59577b3faaebbbf12
http://dunck.us/collab/GreaseMonkeyUserScriptsSpe
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Well - no. Not unless what you actually mean is "use a small subset of CSS 1". And even then there are minor incosistencies and differences that can end up biting you (although they often won't). If you want your site to work in IE, and you do, then you either need to stick with minimal CSS support, or have forked or otherwise hacked up CSS. Period. Additionally, if you want to support IE 5 (not nearly as rare as Netscape 4), you have to be aware of the broken box model and work around it via hacks. IEs behavior prior to IE 6 (with the right doctype) is just plain wrong and CSS written for it will *not* work in other browsers.
Yes, it's called Safari.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
I discussed this with a friend some six years ago. The problem with standards like HTML and CSS can be summed up in one word:
MAY
By putting the word may into a standard, you make the standard non-standard. If you can't reliably depend upon CSS to render a dashed line on a border, why do you even provide it? Two completely compliant browsers can give you a different picture, depending on their choice to implement optional components.
There are enough issues with non-compliant browsers that we don't need to build issues into the standards!
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
The figures were three years old, when that article was written two years ago. 3 + 2 = 5, LOL!
Welcome to reading the fucking article.
Here we are at the apocalypse, and we still never got to play Duke Nukem Forever.
Yeah, I went there.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Absolute nonsense. I implement sites for major commercial organisations which use standards-based CSS 1 and 2.1, and they work just fine cross-modern-browser - IE-Win, IE-Mac, Opera, Firefox, Safari, you name it. And when I say "just fine", I mean "look identical to the pixel", as well as scaling seamlessly for visually impaired users, being fully accessible to assistive technologies, having semantically pure markup and degrading gracefully in ye olde browsers.
On my current project I combine floating, absolute positioning and just about every other CSS technique in the book, and out of 1800+ lines of CSS across the entire site, just 13 are to cater for IE's brokenness.
Everything one needs to know to make standards-compliant sites that work in today's browsers is out there (including avoiding the IE-5-Win box model problem), but many "web designers" are so lacking in an understanding of the technologies with which they work that they can't or won't improve. I see new sites produced using nested tables, for goodness sake; I used those techniques myself last century when there was no alternative, but these people really need to get with the programme.
It's the same problem that leads to so many useless implementations in any field: the vast majority of people are unwilling to undertake a process of constantly improving and refining their skills, and the employers aren't sufficiently well-informed to make the distinction between those who work hard to make the best possible use of the available technologies, and those who read a book about HTML in 1997 and have been marking time ever since.
Luckily things are now changing, and clueful organisations are demanding people who can work with standards. A lot of people who think they understand how to produce a web page are going to be looking for alternative employment over the next year or so unless they catch up on the advances made over the last few years.
</rant>Thank you for listening; have a nice day :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Taken from A List Apart:
"Perhaps the biggest benefit of this particular example is the bandwidth savings:
* Savings per page without caching the CSS file: ~2KB per request
* Savings per page with caching the CSS file: ~9KB per request
Though a few KB doesn't sound like a lot of bandwidth, let's add it up. Slashdot's FAQ, last updated 13 June 2000, states that they serve 50 million pages in a month. When you break down the figures, that's ~1,612,900 pages per day or ~18 pages per second. Bandwidth savings are as follows:
* Savings per day without caching the CSS files: ~3.15 GB bandwidth
* Savings per day with caching the CSS files: ~14 GB bandwidth
Most Slashdot visitors would have the CSS file cached, so we could ballpark the daily savings at ~10 GB bandwidth. A high volume of bandwidth from an ISP could be anywhere from $1 - $5 cost per GB of transfer, but let's calculate it at $1 per GB for an entire year. For this example, the total yearly savings for Slashdot would be: $3,650 USD!
Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive."
Using the layout as slashcode, it seems that the font is specified to be Serif everywhere... I much prefer to read on-screen stuff with a sans font, which is my default. Please dont specify the font and just use my browser's default... Please remove "font-family: serif;" from the body{}
Thank you,
Tester
...and use CSS to reposition the sidebar/navbar content below it. Half the point to using CSS for accessibility is to avoid going through navlinks at the beginning of every page. I hear these guys managed it across their site without compromising performance in IE 6 or spectacular hacks (and yes, it was tested in IE, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Konqueror).
For the curious, the left and right navbars are absolutely positioned and the central content has left/right margins which mimic their width, to achieve the same liquid layout.
The HTML4.0 thing is bullshit, plain and simple. Authoring tools like Dreamweaver work better when working within XHTML spec, just lose the XML prolog until The Brave New World of XML-parsing UAs is here and we can stop serving text/html. XHTML1.0 Transitional plays nice with every UA I've tested, from Netscape 4.7 up.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
Is it really too much to ask that you run your site through a validator?
Really come on now, I'm sure you've duped the 'importance of validating' articles before. And what's up with HTML Strict, why not XHTML strict? Get your nerd programming skills together.
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
But I think there is a point somewhere in there to be made. Remember HTML 1.0? Simply the fact that tags like STRONG, H1-H6, and ADDRESS exists points pretty clearly to the intent to allow a site to describe what was being presented but allow the browser to determine how it was presented. Of course, there were a load of problems with this and people's ideas of how it should be used, and we like to think we've come a long way. But in truth, we're still doing the same things.
Rather than trying to be the control-freak with everything exactly positioned, it's far more useful (and elegant to program) to have a site which can do without X, Y, or Z and still convey all the information it did before. A site that degrades gracefully may not impress the casual user, but the casual user will be able to use it.
Look at the most successful commercial sites out there today. Google's front page and search results are viewable in every possible browser I can come up with. eBay is one of the ugliest sites in existence, but its content is available to nearly any browser. Hit amazon.com with Lynx and you can still buy things.
Successful web sites are not pretty. They're functional. CSS is a tool to make more functional pages. Yes, you can also make them prettier, but if you set out with that as your goal, you'll fail the more important one.
Since the site is slashdotted, here's the article text (it's funny, laugh!)
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="description" content="Slash + CSS -- article related to Slash.">
<title>Slashcode | Slash + CSS</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/base.css" >
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/comments.css" >
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/ostgnavbar.css" >
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/slashcode.css" title="Slashcode" >
<link rel="Alternate stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen, projection" href="//www.slashcode.com/slashdot.css" title="Slashdot" >
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="print" href="//www.slashcode.com/print.css" >
<!-- start template: ID 169, ssihead;misc;default -->
Sorry - I'm not allowed to show you any more because it violats the posting filter. Stay tuned for the next exciting installment.
I like the sound of what you say. I would love to be able to do CSS web sites that work on everything.
I am a very technical guy who is usually designing and building hardware and software. However, I am in a small company, and am going to end up producing a web site for it whether I like it or not.
Soo.. could you provide a few links or names of books that I read that would allow me to make web sites in the way you describe? Assume someone who is used to being given a pile of books in a new subject, and has a working prototype running in about three weeks. I normally sit down and just start implementing stuff, using the books as a continuous reference. Then I redo the stuff I did badly, once I know more about the subject. I suppose this means that little code snippets are of the most use to me, along with good explanations of what is actually going on.
I realise you may have better things to do, but I am interested in what you consider to be "good" sources of information for this; you approach is one I appreciate.
Thanks
---
let's see:
/. a while back, it goes through some of the steps of converting a static image of a /. page to XHTML and CSS)
HTML 3.2 - 1997
HTML 4.01 - 1999 (!)
XHTML 1.0 - 2000, revised in 2002
XHTML 1.1 - 2001
Welcome to the year 1999. The future is now. While I appreciate the efforts of the Slashcode developers, I would like to point out that it is still possible to write spectacularly awful code in HTML 4.01. Yes, it is possible to do so in XHTML, but it is more difficult. My one request to the developers (and believe me, you will thank me when maintaining this code base) is to use <div> tags, lists, and CSS positioning for layout instead of tables. It makes your code so much cleaner and easier to edit. In fact, to me it is the main benefit of CSS.
(If you remember this article, posted to
So will this be the year of Linux on the desktop?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
it does not validate[1] -- you've got 2 typos:
h ttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashcode.com%2Fslashdot.css&userm edium=all
line 242: "#adminfooter label , #adminfooter legend,{". remove the comma
at the end of the selector, and then line 488: "#usermenu ul.menu
a.end... padding: 5px 11px 0 0 2px;". you've got 5 values for the
padding property. it only takes 4 (for top, right, bottom and left,
respectively).
other suggestions:
- use descriptive names for classes. i'm seeing things like: #misc,
#frame and it's hard to remember what you're styling when you've
labelled it in a rush and just given it a placeholder for a name. other
class names are bound to locations (like #topnav) which is meta-semantic
rather than semantic and confusing since it's easy enough to decide to
css position it elsewhere and then you're going to have to change the
code again. (the point of css is to separate content from
presentation, so take the presentation out of your class names/ids and
leave it up to the css properties.) also, there are known quirk issues
with underscores in class names, eg your: #index_qlinks-content. rather
use hypens.
- for screen media, use a default font of sans-serif (you're using
serif). sans-serif is proven easier on the eye on low resolution devices
(like your monitor).
- when specifying a colour, you're encouraged to always provide both
foreground and background colours in the same css rule, as it's often
not obvious what the cascade will do and you can easily end up with
illegible text. for example, at least replace your:
a { color: #066; }
with:
a { color: #066; background-color: inherit; }
- you're using a mixture of css unit measurements. if you want text to
resize and print easier, try replacing the pixel (px) measurements with
ems or percentages (aka fluid layout). or provide a print stylesheet.
- i'm not sure on this[2], but apparently most elements do not have
intrinsic width and when you float something you should give it a width
even if it's just a width:auto.
- p
--
1.
W3C CSS Validator results for http://www.slashcode.com/slashdot.css
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=
2.
Visual formatting model
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#floats
It looks pretty good on: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.2; Linux) KHTML/3.2.3 (like Gecko)
It even works well with the larger fonts I prefer to use.