Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot HTML 4.01 and CSS
After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full complement of CSS. While there are a handful of bugs and some lesser used functionality isn't quite done yet, the transition has gone very smoothly. You can use our sourceforge project page to submit bugs and we'd really appreciate the feedback. Thanks to Tim Vroom for putting the HTML in place, Wes Moran for writing the HTML in the first place, and Pudge for writing the code to convert
900k users, 60k stories, and 13 million comments to comply. And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot: some sort of official contest to re-design Slashdot is coming soon, so you can get a head start now.
Response to some reader notes in the forum:
- There are a handful of validation errors. Some will be fixed in the next day or so. Others are external HTML that is out of our hands. We may never toally validate with zero errors. yes we're comfortable with that.
- We're not going to XHTML for the same reasons as above- we control almost all of our HTML, but some of it (like the ads, and imports from other sites) just isn't ours to muck about with. We could go to XHTML, and someday we might, but today we're happy to just get to HTML 4.01 and CSS.
- Light Mode will be back in some form or another. The problem is that light mode served two purposes: Low Bandwidth, and Simplified Design. The later will probably be handled with a CSS theme (we have a handheld theme already). Low Bandwidth is a little trickier, but we will resolve that soon.
- All of our code is beta tested on www.slashcode.com and use.perl.org. Unfortunately there's always a few issues from those tiny tiny sites and the giant bohemoth that is Slashdot itself.
I was wondering if there was going to be a story on this. I noticed the upgrade last night. Let me be the first (post? ha ha) to say, "Good job guys!" Yeah. it took you awhile. But better late than never, eh?
:-)
/team!
And for the brave, download the stylesheet and start experimenting with new themes and designs for Slashdot:
I was just going to ask if we could get a few more CSS styles like we saw in the Beta. Glad to see you're already on top of it.
I did some testing with a FireFox version I *know* contains the infamous "Slashdot bug". (Not sure if it's corrected in recent versions since I normally use Mozilla or Safari.) As far as I can tell from testing, the bug is completely fixed. Considering the upgrades, one would expect this to be the case, but you can never be too sure.
Last but not least, the "Politics" and "Apple" sections look as nice as ever, but I'm afraid that the other sections look worse than ever. Can we turn off the colors for the other sites until better CSS sheets can be made? (Preferrably ones that don't hurt our eyes?) Yeah, the games section has the full treatment too, but I swear that the shades of purple it uses are causing me to go blind.
An alternative solution to turning off the CSS for the other sections is to provide the front page CSS as a style option on all the pages. That way we could simply shut off the crazy colors without pulling the whole "games.slashdot.org/article.pl -> slashdot.org/article.pl" trick.
Well, that's my 3.14159265 cents worth. Again, good job
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I for one, welcome our new Standards Compliant Overlords.
How does the Slashdot Effect happen given that no slashdotters ever RTFA?
April's Fool day again?
Grundgesetz * 23. Mai 1949 - 30. November 2007 - http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/
Ummm... WOW. I don't know what to say... WOW
What kind of news is this anyways?
Well done
Whats wrong with the current design?
Why not XHTML?
... slashdot does not work with Netscape 4 when I try it today.
I tried it because of a gnarly bug in Opera, requesting pages from the wrong sites....
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
Why don't you guys have a formal testing process in place for slashcode?
Seriously, its like every Thursday morning its a big test to determine how many '503 Service Unavailable' we will get.
If this was done in a real web app environment, you'd guys wouldn't have your cushy jobs, ya know...
Having said that, I get a 500 error randomly on any post...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Why not have like a beta.slashdot.org, and put these changes there. That way the bleeding-edge travelers will use it and report bugs, while we can use what is current until that is ready? Makes sense to me anyway...
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
nice one guys !
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
Yes, and for those of us using "Light" slashdot version (it's in "Preferences" - white background etc, _much_ easier to read IMHO) now it looks like a buttload of shit. $(SUBJ). Will it be fixed?
I just checked this morning and noticed something different looks great. Hell of a lot better then before. Looks a lot cleaner and sleaker. However my only concern is if you included an automated duper-detector. Or is that asking too much?
Very nice guys!
I'm liking this new comment window too. It's much cleaner looking.
Although the Slashdot guys have blocked it again, there was a short time this morning where the validator could get through. It showed the main page as validating Ok for the most part, but some of the sidebars (especially the Freshmeat sidebar) as failing miserably. Just looking at the source doesn't give me a headache anymore though, which is a massive improvement.
I read the internet for the articles.
Anyone else have mod points but no option to use them?
Response from http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww .slashdot.org%2F is:
403 ForbiddenHmm.
Compliment is an expression of praise; complement is the correct word to use.
Congratuations
That must have been as scary as the idea of cleaning the Aegean stables.
On my rendering (dumb old IE 6 something) there is heaps of wasted space and squishing up of comments and subjects on my journal page that used to look better/more space efficent - but I look forward to the challenge of figuring out how to fix it...
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
So, from where do we "download the stylesheet?"
As with the sun's light
My mom was magnificent
Unquestionable
Give ccs a test drive
goto www.slashcode.com
In firefox (screw you ie users; no slashdot for you!) View>Page Style>Slashdot
enjoy!
XHTML?
Coderz 4 Life
Validator says it's not correct Strict. There are 13 errors. Some areas still have FONT tags and whatnot, but I don't know if those are includes from external sites (and therefore out of
Welcome to the 21st Century.
At first glance, it doesn't look any different to me, so you must have done something right.
Except then I hit reply and the post a comment dialog looks a bit different but not bad.
Must have been quite the effort, congrats.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Please fix. Thanks
summary: "This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Strict!"
Sure, only 13 on the front page of /. (don't remember how much before) and they all seem relatively minor. Still, sure is better than what it was. Glad to see it.
thng
I wake up about 5 am to take a pee and when I was walking back to my bed I had the idea to check slashdot just to see what was going on. When I saw the new layout I though: "holy sh*t, am I dreaming? I don't remember changing my broswer settings..." and get back to my bad...
I like the larger comment boxes and more efficient use of screen space.
Very sharp.
Cheers to you and your continued efforts! Your work here is valuable beyond what most people comprehend.
-FL
is ice flows in hell grinding together. (It's not frozen solid yet - we need Duke Nukem Forever to be relased or Windows thrown open to the world under GPL for that to happen.)
Congratulations on getting a working site after such a move
I had noticed the change, since now all the fonts are in bold and huge on my system. It takes a couple of ctrl- to get them down to a normal size. Although minor things like this I imagine will be ironed out in due course.
While I congratulate the TECH site Slashdot for bringing its content into the realms of somewhat standardized code in a time when most sites have -- at last -- switched to Unicode compliance and XHTML (still a last century technology), I put the coffee in the throat when trying to validate the site:
a shdot.org%2F
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsl
I got the following unexpected response when trying to retrieve http://slashdot.org/>:
403 Forbidden
I read the light version, I guess the devs forgot all about it
MOD PARENT UP tnx
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Boo-Yah Fark!!
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fsla shdot.org%2F&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&do ctype=Inline
Still, it's move in the right direction.
I was wondering if there was some documentation on how you all went about doing the conversion? Like more documentation on the CSS work for people to learn from it.
...because Firefox consistently rendered the pages a fraction of a second quicker than I was used to/expecting.
/. too much".
This tells us two things: "CSS is good" and "Justin reads
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Time to get on the Duke Nukem watch...
Why did'nt slashdot choose to go directly to XHTML instead?
Great job on the transition!
Whoa guys! Welcome to 1999!
Can we get some stats APIs? Like per-story counts of unique repliers (+/- ACs), broken down by point score, with metadata (date/time posted, categories, submitter ID, "author" ID). And links in the story, and comments (per point score)? How about some karma details?
I'd like to see a Slashdotter make an app that shows trends of posting results. And an app that draws networks between posters, destinations, categories, etc. Let's rub Slashdot's soft green underbelly!
--
make install -not war
Looking at the source of the front page (my logged-in version), I can say there's still plenty of little things to be fixed.
" width="104" height="38" alt="Google" title="Google" >
I've seen A tags whose HREF value was unquoted (e.g. <a href=http://blahblah>).
There's garbage such as this:
<div class="details">
<b>Posted by
<a href="http://cmdrtaco.net/">CmdrTaco</a>
on 08:34 AM September 22nd, 2005</b><br>
<strong>from the <b>just-don't-start-a-stampede</b> dept.</strong>
</div>
Note the opening <b>, but no corresponding closer. mixing <b> and <strong> (but isn't <strong> deprecated?). And someone's got a few too many slashes here and there:
<a href="http:////slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=217">
<img src="//images.slashdot.org/topics/topicgoogle.gif
</a>
This was just a cursory check. there's probably a lot more to be fixed. But damn, I thought hell had frozen over -- this is a good start!
Links used to show Slashdot colors and frames properly even in text mode on an 80x25 screen (or at least close approximations that were very usable), but now all of the content is strung together vertically, making the site much harder to use.
Time to start playing with site settings, I guess...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I think you mean Augean stables.
l
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Herakles/stables.htm
No but, yeah but, no but...
This fixes the Firefox bug but adds a minor bug in Konqueror. The copyright notice at the bottom of the page overlaps the search box and button.
I like the new Post Comment page design.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
http://img310.imageshack.us/img310/5150/screenshot 2vj.png
BUSTED
I'm glad they moved all the way up to HTML 4.01 instead of that crazy XHTML crap that ALA basically handed to them.
Really.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Wow, this looks NICE. You guys needed to go to CSS for a LONG time.
Now, how 'bout taking a cue from AvantSlash, and making http://slashdot.org/palm actually work nicely?
AvantSlash is horribly broken, now, due to your changes (although I knew it was coming, and so did they.) So, one of two things needs to happen: the guy behind AvantSlash needs to update it, or you guys need to make the Palm site work.
you don't deserve to get the Stylesheet.
Hint: Look in the effing Source....
Great job. The Firefox DOM Inspector let's me analize the structure, and I can hide section with the simple CSS Editor.
..." color="#006666"> .
By the way does it validate?
Result: Failed validation, 12 errors
Most errors due to the freshmeat bits...
# Error Line 628 column 65: document type does not allow element "BR" here;
.
The mentioned element is not allowed to appear in the context in which you've placed it; the other mentioned elements are the only ones that are both allowed there and can contain the element mentioned. This might
mean that you need a containing element, or possibly that you've
forgotten to close a previous element. One possible cause for this message is that you have attempted to put a block-level element
# Error Line 629 column 54: document type does not allow element "INPUT" here; missing one of "P", "H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "PRE", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag.
Has anyone noticed that the infamous google site flavored search does not validate against XHTML 1.0 transitional (as in this site, link for validator at bottom)?
When I first pulled up the page, I immediately noticed that they had to be using CSS. Did everyone else notice the CSS change right away, too? I've been trying to figure out why some people can tell right away what makes a site tick without looking at code or anything. Anyway, great job, I love times of transition; They can be so exciting.
I see a banner AD in Firefox, but not in IE. WTF?
Oh good... now that the presentation involves nice pretty DIVs and CSS, I can finally make that Greasemonkey script I've been wanting without having to pull my hair out. To heck with your layout, I can make it look like whatever I want.
In fact... wouldn't be hard to add some "missing" features such as article moderation, dup removal. Hmm. Could be something there...
So that's what is wrong with it. I have been looking at the page all day thinking there was something weird going on and now I know!
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
And hell hath frozen over.
Most die-hard firefox users will know this, but since Taco threw down the gauntlet, those mere firefox mortals who wish to muck with the CSS and "win a prize!" can take a look at: Jesse Ruderman's page on using local style sheets (good links there) and there's always the style sheet chooser plus add on (yeah, the site's in French and I haven't tried that extension in a while since I use Safari mostly, but it should work).
Mind the gap...
We're getting there
...once the ads are put back in between the stories and the comments? Or are we going to stick with ads only on the tops of pages?
The CB App. What's your 20?
(just kidding, although i can't see much difference)
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
Is it possible to make my own style sheets and view slashdot with them? Should I save a page and then change the reference to my own style sheet and reload the saved page? Should I not worry about it because the editors will select styles using the same wisdom they use to select headlines?
After eight years, this news website has finally gotten around to using proper HTML.
So, will it be another eight years before this news website gets around to using some proper editors?
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Everything looks pretty good, except I don't know if I like the new font. Not sure why, just looks funny.
Ooo, ooo, do you think anybody can find a more painful color scheme for the gaming section? Maybe mix some bright neon orange in with the bright neon green. I know the Slashdot editors were trying to get us all to vomit when we viewed it and although it's close, it's still not quite there... sometimes I can view the games section and not barf all over my desk.
Seriously, it's great that you're finally getting around to fixing it, but who the hell chose those offensively ugly color schemes in the first place and what was the purpose behind it? Incompetence, or just spite?
Comment of the year
badly broken in opera, but who uses opera, i mean .. it's not even beer free .. oh wait! ..
Most of the time, if you see a comment about Slashdot and its management somewhere in one of the stories, it's negative. So far, the comments on this story are overwhelmingly positive, if somewhat backhanded. (eg, "Great job! Welcome to the 21st century.")
It's nice to see that we're still capable of recognizing a good thing, even if we're irritated with everything else.
Now, about an automated dupe-checker...
(PS - the reply/submit comment has a substantially different look and feel to it. I like it a lot.)
My compliments to the Slashdot group; they've done a very nice job with this. Standards-compliant HTML and CSS complements Slashdot's content in a sweet way.
Perhaps the article could be edited to bring spelling into compliance with english standards?
Can someone please explain the thinking behind goodies like this:
<div id="slogan">
<h2>
News for nerds, stuff that matters
</h2>
</div>
What's with the extra DIVs all over the place? What's wrong with applying the id and class attributes directly, like so:
<h2 id="slogan">
News for nerds, stuff that matters
</h2>
This seems to be a common misconception - "going CSS" doesn't mean that you have to wrap everything in a DIV.
Fails at w3c. It still looks better and is way faster, so big ups to y'all.
this is getting old and so are you
blog
XHTML: Hey baby, you got style.
CSS: *blushes* Why, thank you.
After 8 years of my nasty, crufty, hodge podged together HTML, last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full compliment of CSS.
A spokesman for CSS said: "well done you guys!"
Or did you mean a full complement?
Now the slashdot live comment tree plugin for firefox/ greasemonkey doesn't work. Can we please go back to the crappy broken html?
Nice, slashdot blocks the w3c validator (validator.w3.org) from accessing their site :D. However, firefox finally uses 'Standards compliance mode' as the Render mode!
Now let's wait another 10 years for XHTML 1.0 Strict so we can do some funky XSL transforms
xer.xes -- 4181
Looks great, and by great, I mean it looks like nothing changed. The best kind of upgrade (short of the ones that introduce new features) is the one that goes unnoticed, but fixes things that were broken.
I apparently stopped by last night in the middle of something happening, as I got a very broken page a few times, with columns all out of whack, etc. I was excited though, because I knew The Change was happening.
Thanks to all involved.
Now, about those colors...
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
i like it and good work ;-)
we now return you to your regularly scheduled negativity...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. Error Line 19 column 40: there is no attribute "LANGUAGE".
...rg/knobs.gif" width="25" height="15" hspace="1" vspace="1"
...h="25" height="15" hspace="1" vspace="1
...
/noscript>
script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://a.as-us.falkag.
2. Error Line 292 column 73: there is no attribute "HSPACE".
3. Error Line 292 column 84: there is no attribute "VSPACE".
4. Error Line 293 column 8: there is no attribute "BORDER".
border="0" usemap="#poll" align="right">
5. Error Line 293 column 33: there is no attribute "ALIGN".
border="0" usemap="#poll" align="right">
6. Error Line 293 column 40: required attribute "ALT" not specified.
border="0" usemap="#poll" align="right">
74. Error Line 1820 column 10: end tag for "NOSCRIPT" which is not finished.
It's a lot crisper design overall, I like it, the new post comment box might have too much blank space (Does my URL and email really need 4 lines total?) and the ugly colored sections are still ugly, but at least now they can be de-uglyified with ease.
SAILING MISHAP
The HTML 4.01 specification was published in the 90s. As was CSS 1. As was CSS 2. So really, welcome to the 90s, Slashdot.
As far as the code goes, it looks pretty decent. It's a misuse of <strong> for the dept. lines though - they aren't meant to be strongly emphasised are they? It looks like somebody's gung-ho about replacing <b> with <strong> without understanding why.
The fonts look a little off in some places. Also, the font size is greatly reduced on the page where you view your latest comments. The font size I've configured in my browser is fine, there's no need to reduce it by a further 25%, thank you.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
I'm absolutely enjoying slashdot like it is today, like it has been the last years. It's one of the few constants in the quickly evolving world of the internet.
Slashdot was my first geek newssite I enjoyed reading on a daily basis, it was the only credible and reachable newssource on 9/11.
Please keep it like the way it is today!
could anyone clue me in as to why you'd even have to touch the comments or stories to change their presentation?
HURRAY for Slashdot, glad to see they've moved up the ladder with compliant standard web development. Kudos to all those that helped in making Slashdot and redesigned to be exactly the same. Hope to see user preferred themes soon or yet best, i would love to see that Slashdot would allow their stlyesheets to be replaced with others.
To be more efficient, you could have filtered for uniqueness. Then you would have only had to filter about 50k stories. But I guess if you knew how to filter for unique stories, you wouldn't work at Slashdot. ;)
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Finally, I can use Amaya the only truly compliant browser to view /.! (Since Amaya is made by the W3C, it is, by definition, the standard.)
Best Buy can have you arrested
Slashdot's best feature is that the site is ugly, we *love* it that way, don't change it!
...last night we finally switched over to clean HTML 4.01 with a full compliment of CSS...
i think he meant a full COMPLEMENT of CSS
[move
Slashdot loads fast now!!!!!!
:-D
I love it... thought I wish you had used XHTML strict.
lazy punks.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I would be very interested to know wheter this change has a big effect on the slashdot bandwith usage.
Yayyyy! It looks really great in Firefox; I couldn't even tell that it was CSS. I like the way the middle part changes size when the window is resized; the fact that this trick works in both IE6 and Firefox is impressive.
:), but I really like this change.
I know it is rare for people to say positive things around here
- Sam
'Times New Roman' is so 27BC. It'd only take one line of css to get something with class. Like 'Comic Sans MS'. Everyone loves 'Comic Sans MS'.
We could go to xHTML 4.01 strict, and someday we might, but today we're happy to just get to 4.01 and CSS.
I'm sure by the time you upgrade again, xhtml 4.01 will exist.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
Yeah, I was wondering why the story's titles after "Is AOL The Key to Microsoft 'Killing' Google?" had bigger fonts. Seems like a good upgrade after all.
There are a few warnings on the pages, though. You should try to validate them on w3c's validator, or this excelent extension for Firefox.
Anyway, kudos to you all.
what's the <wbr> tag all about? IE only right? (not sure)
;)
hitting "Ctrl-A" in firefox with the Web Developer Extension installed (W3C Markup Validation Service - form upload) gives me around 40 errors - some from the included commercials but some slashdot related too...hitting "Ctrl-H" (check by url) even gives a nice 403? doesn't really help in debugging
hey do you NOT want people to check if your code is standard compliant? or do you just oppose the W3C Markup Validation Service? i know "clean HTML" doesn't really imply standard compliance - well actually i implied it...
nice tableless layout though!
need an appartment or house in bavaria?
You should get some of the CSS Zen Garden guys to come up with something.
activestudios web design
I just loaded Slashdot in Netscape 4.80 and it does work. I reckon you just assumed that CSS would leave people using older browsers behind without actually trying it out. CSS was designed to degrade gracefully in older browsers.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
My biggest beef with it is that the Slashboxes don't work. I've switched to the regular layout for the time being, but it's horrid; so cluttered when compared with the simple, clean light version.
-Stephen
Everything is faster.
Since HTML 4.01 strict and XHTML 1.0 Transitional are so close, only minor differences really, you could easily make Slashdot XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
Now slashdot looks very bad in dillo and graphical links, both of which don't support CSS, but used to render the old code just fine.
Maybe a non-CSS version could still be made available for those of us with non-CSS supporting browsers?
BUT ! If you can read Slashdot using Telnet, it's not Slashdot anymore !
On a little more serious note, however, sections could be ordered in a better way for lynx / links users (like, login to the top, advertisements to the bottom ;)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
...get the following fixed? When you browse with a threshold that doesn't show all comments, the page numbers to click are completely broken. Sometimes, when I click on the 3rd or 4th page, I _still_ see the first post according to my threshold.
There is actually no way to view all comments in order. I usually resort to clicking a page way later, like the 6th or 7th until I see a comment other than the first. But then I don't know if I missed any.
The pages seem to count all comments regardless of score. The proper way is to count the posts _after_ the threshold is applied.
This has been bugging me _for ages_!
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Wow, /. can even keep them letters from spilling into them pictures and vicy-versy. Who'da thunk someday they'd even clean up der mess? I 'member the day we'd just hafta wonder when dey might figure out them code thingys could be used to make things look better 'stead t'other way 'round.
I just checked this morning and noticed something different looks great. Hell of a lot better then before. Looks a lot cleaner and sleaker. However my only concern is if you included an automated duper-detector. Or is that asking too much?
I got this meassage from /.:
This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original...
For comments at least, an automated duper-detector has been successfully implemented. :)
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
If you've ever done serious web design then you know that going from a 5 year old plus table-based layout to a completely CSS-driven one is more like a Godzilla step.
More importantly, it makes things like what you are requesting relative bably steps.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
"We're not going to strict"
In perhaps the most important measure, spelling errors in editor comments, it's still the same Slashdot. I find that comforting.
"Just looking at the source doesn't give me a headache anymore though, which is a massive improvement."
/.!
Yeah, all I see now is blonde, brunette, redhead.
Wait a minute, that's not
In Firefox 1.5b1, the stuff after Read More has really odd linebreaks when you set your /. preferences to the bare minimum. (no graphics, threshold 3 and higher...)
( Read More... |
# 23 of 139 comments
| games.slashdot.org
)
me too :D
nice.
That's what happens when someone writes a browser to get around the crappiness we see on the Web.
Can Links really not use the stylesheet to do something useful with the content?
I think in some places the code is nicer, but for all, I don't like the bloated fonts, and it's still fairly ugly. Hopefully the staff will keep tuning the style-sheets to make this look decent.
This signature was left intentionally blank.
different CSS themes?
If you don't vote, you don't matter, so don't waste your time telling me your opinion
I thought it looked slightly different!
I posted this arbitrary comment just so I could see the pretty new comment posting page that someone else mentioned. It is indeed very pretty.
Some boxes in the new design don't seem to have enough padding (especially vertically), and look slightly off - I hope that gets tweaked.
How long until the first 733+ w3bd321gn0r with too much time on his hands makes a funky custom stylesheet?
Now that pages take so much less time to render in browsers, Slashdot.org has reduced the overall computational load on the Web. So much less heat generated by browsing computers, so much less power consumed, foreign oil and coal burned. Of course, now we'll more swiftly move from the Front Page directly to Slashdotting some poor server unwittingly mentioned in the story. Maybe the smoke from burning servers will make up for our horde of cleaner-running Slashdotters.
--
make install -not war
+5 FUNNY
This is great, but it's not entirely clear to me why it took so long. I once wrote a fully CSS enabled Slashcode theme for a customer, and it didn't even take all that long!
the list of comments posted on the user page is no longer full width so there is a really ugly white gap next to it.
the reply form is now so much bulkier that i generally have to scroll down before i can enter my post.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
I admit to being a noob to HTML/CSS/web development. However, I just wanted to say GREAT WORK because Slashdot loads pages waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay faster on my end than it did before this change. The speed increase is incredible.
In safari and it seems firefox for macintosh weirdness abounds throughout the new slashdot layout. Things show up in sans-serif fonts at random, for example the contents of the "recent posts" box on user pages, or the "allowed html" beneath a post. Things have unexplained margins or indents; for example the "Subject" box when you submit seems to be over one space from the comment box. When showing comments, all the gray boxes have surprisingly large internal margins but everything else has no margins at all, all the comments are scrunched together. Font sizes seem to vary sometimes at random, for example the first three headlines on the front page are a totally different size from the ones beneath. The whole thing looks a bit hodgepodge.
Of course, web design is unpredictable and I'm sure it'll get sorted out eventually.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
When in doubt, don't assume the bug is somebody else's fault unless you understand what's going on.
HTML, as you know, lets you omit the delimiting quotes for attribute values sometimes. For example, type=text is valid. However, just because you can omit them sometimes, it doesn't mean you can always omit them. Your page contains the following code:
The validator is saying that you have a closing </a> tag when you don't have an open <a> element. That is correct - you already closed the <a> element.
See, in order to provide us with the shortcut of not having to specify attribute names for some purposes (e.g. <input disabled>), HTML uses an SGML feature known as SHORTTAG NET. However, that's not the only shortcut it provides. It also lets you write <foo>bar</foo> as <foo/bar/.
Of course, I've only heard of one or possibly two browsers that have ever implemented this, so I'm not surprised that you haven't heard of it. In any case, one of the consequences of this shortcut is that you can't use slashes in attribute values unless you quote them - otherwise the parser has no way of knowing whether you are closing the tag or not. So when you write:
That has exactly the same meaning as this:
So, later on, when you try and close your <a> element, the validator rightly complains that there's no open <a> element to close.
If you actually find a real bug in the validator, then feel free to report it. If you had done this with the "bug" you are complaining about, then you would have found the answer to the problem a lot quicker.
It might be worth actually fixing this one, as I've seen some search engine bots trip over on similar things (XHTML-style empty meta elements in HTML documents, etc), so you might be preventing some search engine bots from indexing anything but the front page of your website.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Print preview in Opera 8.02 results in a black page with white margins and blue links. It's fine in IE and probably Ff. I don't know it it would result in a black printout, and I'm not going to waste toner just to find it out ;)
Otherwise an excellent job, congrats to all involved!
Maybe by the end of the decade, you'll be xhtml transitional compliant!
Two 21st century thumbs up.
Version 8.5
Build 7700
Platform Win32
System Windows XP
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I'd be really interested in some stats for Slashdot now they've changed to HTML 4.01 and CSS. I wonder how much of a difference it has made to the server load and amount of data being chucked about as well as overall server response time?!
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
Do you think you could increase your bandwidth? I'm still tired of being on a 3 mbit connection and having to wait 45+ seconds to get a comment posted. Cleaner and (hopefully) smaller and more efficient design is nice, but this lag is just killing me.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Pls fix k thx. :)
I'm seeing a web site that basically looks the same. Why change?
This is my sig.
Eat this:
* http://flgr.dyndns.org/slashdot-less-gay.png
* http://flgr.dyndns.org/slash.css
You can test slash.css with Firefox' excellent EditCss extension: http://editcss.mozdev.org/
I was wondering why Slashdot looked all screwed under IE5.0 at school.
Some think the Internet is a bad thing. I just think that AOL is a bad thing.
I came to the page, and everything looked like before (good). I logged in, and all texts were bold (bad). Please please please, can you check what's wrong? All this bold text makes me wanna crawl under my bed & be afraid... or so. Blah.
-- Power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
I, for one, welcome our new CSS-touting overlords.
On a serious note though, excellent work. It's a welcomed change.
Finance tutorials and more! Understandfinance
You're in Light Mode. Slashboxes don't appear in Light Mode for obvious reasons (and I believe that's a change from before). Go to Preferences: Homepage and uncheck Light, then save. That should do the trick.
I think most of the work in Links was focused on getting things like frames and such to be proportionate but still usable in text mode, and I don't think the base Links browser (the original tree, not the "2.x" or "hacked" versions like eLinks, etc.) supports stylesheets at all.
... until today. :-( :-(
Too bad -- most of the other forums sites I read (OSNews, Linux Today, etc.) are still very usable in classic Links, and Slashdot was as well
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Validate Slashdot's Coral Cache! http://slashdot.org.nyud.net:8090/
:P )
t tp%3A%2F%2Fslashdot.org.nyud.net%3A8090%2F&charset =(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&ss=1
..." color="#006666"><b>Search Freshmeat:</b></font><br>
...gif?l,332" width="1" height="1" border="0" alt="">
...idth="1" height="1" border="0" alt="">
:D to keep the errors hidden. muahahahaha.
Anyway here's the Coral Cache of the W3C validating the Coral Cache of Slashdot! (can't get any longer than that
http://validator.w3.org.nyud.net:8090/check?uri=h
And here's the result:
1. Line 18, column 40: there is no attribute "LANGUAGE" .
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="http://a.as-us.falkag.
2. Line 303, column 25: there is no attribute "ALIGN" .
<div class="ad2" align="center"><!-- ad position 2 -->
3. Line 637, column 11: there is no attribute "SIZE"
<font size="3" color="#006666"><b>Search Freshmeat:</b></font><br>
4. Line 637, column 21: there is no attribute "COLOR" .
<font size="3" color="#006666"><b>Search Freshmeat:</b></font><br>
5. Line 637, column 30: element "FONT" undefined
<font size="3" color="#006666"><b>Search Freshmeat:</b></font><br>
6. Line 637, column 65: document type does not allow element "BR" here; missing one of "P", "H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "PRE", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag .
7. Line 638, column 54: document type does not allow element "INPUT" here; missing one of "P", "H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "PRE", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag .
<input type="hidden" name="link" value="freshmeat.net">
8. Line 639, column 27: document type does not allow element "INPUT" here; missing one of "P", "H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "PRE", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag .
<input type="text" name="q">
9. Line 640, column 6: end tag for "FORM" which is not finished .
</form>
10. Line 641, column 9: there is no attribute "ALIGN" .
<p align="right"><a href="http://freshmeat.net/"><b>More Meat...</b></a>
11. Line 1339, column 78: there is no attribute "BORDER" .
12. Line 1339, column 88: document type does not allow element "IMG" here; missing one of "P", "H1", "H2", "H3", "H4", "H5", "H6", "DIV", "ADDRESS" start-tag .
13. Line 1340, column 10: end tag for "NOSCRIPT" which is not finished .
</noscript>
(Hmmm weird, the next time i ran the validation it only gave me 12 errors). Anyway, that's all - considering slashdot used to have around 300 errors, this is quite an advancement. The first errors are probably a missing opening <form> tag.
A workaround (tho I don't know how effective) would be replacing the freshmeat data with an IFrame
.dupe { display: none; }
There's one thing you easily conform to standards with, end your img and br tags properly.
/> />
Example 1: <img src="img.png"
Example 2: <br
I think the redesign should feature some nice corporate stock photos, everything goes Tahoma and news for nerds replaced with "Leveraging real time news from emerging technology channels. Delivering centralised paradigm deliverables".
A nice idea would be a style sheet that you can upload to your user area, and then gets used by the system.
Nothing costs nothing
but is this getting us any closer to the new Duke Nuk'em? Shouldn't you boys be working on that?
This
I disagree. Slashdot has about 6 different page layouts (at most). How tough could this be? And most of their pages are mostly the same. Now, I know that Slashcode is inherently badly written, but I've got to assume that it's still dynamically driven, making the actual amount of HTML across all of Slashdot tiny, actually.
Ever since the November 2003 article on A List Apart, I've been wondering if this day would come. Almost two years later, it looks like it's finally here!
Having worked on smaller sites, I can imagine how difficult this change was. I took a quick peek at the code; it's so much cleaner now, and it loads so much faster! Congratulations, guys.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
Pages load faster, and it doesn't take 3 minutes for a reply to go through. :D
...doesn't render /. properly anymore... not like it ever renders anything properly, though.
Well, at least there's still the slashdot.org/palm, with basicer than basic functionality.
I guess there's still no support for superscript or subscript.
I guess the sentiment of "lets make it purty" takes precidence over actual functionality of a tech website (which, surprise, deals in chemistry).
I just went with how google spelt it.
And I thought you correcting it was like trying to tell me how to spell colour right.
And I always thought it was the same spelling as that Greek sea. Wrong about that too. So I learnt something extra today.
I bet they spelt it differently to both of us. Didn't even use the same alphabet. And don't bother spelling nazi that sentence. It's after midnight and the keyboard keeps sticking esp the bakspace key.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
THANK YOU!
Finally, someone with a brain!
That's a bigger change than CSS!
Jesus! It would have been nice if the site had said yesterday, "Oh, by the way! We're switching the site to CSS tomorrow and unless you change your Light Mode, you're customized homepage willl go away!"
How hard is that?
NOW my complaint is - I don't like my selections on the right side of the page! Guess I'll have to hack the CSS...
Thanks again for your help - I'd never have figured it out on my own, since the Preferences Light Mode description doesn't indicate anything related to the issue.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I noticed that some of the main-site functionality is now gone from the somewhat unattractive light version. I don't mind ugly-- obviously, I wouldn't still be reading slashdot after all these years if that were an issue. The new layout is cleaner, and I don't know how the size stacks up, so perhaps this is a non-issue. Personally, I would like to see the light mode split and go two directions:
1. Low-bandwidth mode:
All the functionality of the full site, less bandwidth, simpler layout. Possibly even using gzip to cruch the page size down further. Currently, light mode lacks the slashboxes and looks awful.
2. Mobile mode:
Stripped-down layout for absolute minimum bandwidth and very-small-screen displays. Articles and comments all present, but no unnecessary cruft by default unless enabled by the user.
Consider this a vote for *at least* a fully-functioning light mode!
You forgot to add the dancing jesus.
Running IE6 and trying to moderate, it was a big mess. Lines overlaid other lines. Almost unreadable. Most of the problems were near the bottom of the page.
CONGRATULATIONS on finally switching to clean HTML+CSS!!! WELL DONE!!!
In an ideal world, stuff like slashdot would fail gracefully. But that's something that probably can be slapped on afterwards, and probably shouldn't interfere with those of us whose browsers are relatively standards-compliant.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Great job, I'm really pleased to see this site is now strict dtd. I was under the impression that this site was generated from some form of database and then saved and generated to static HTML at predefined intervals, so why all the trouble with the conversion, surely that could have happened during the next output?
Why UNIX?
First, that's an appropriate place to keep a Slashdot stylesheet. Second, I didn't know CmdrTaco was in the navy. Go figure. At least he has something to read while he's in there.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Anyone else notice screen updates when scrolling to now be abnormally slow? I'm not using the most up to date pc for web, but now I can actuall watch it draw three segments of the screen (of text!). Only happens in IE, Firefox is fine. What's chewing the horsepower?
Slashboxes were still appearing for me in Light Mode yesterday, and now they're all gone. :( Pretty please can we have them back?
I've been browsing in Light Mode for so long, I'd almost forgot slashdot looked like anything else. It was quicker to load and easier to use on my phone, which was nice because I could just leave it there and not have to toggle my user account back and forth between some sort of crippled "mobile" mode every time I got on my treo.
I don't know if it is a CSS bug or a Treo 650 Blazer bug, but, while Slashdot used to display very nicely on my Treo, and is good until the CSS loads (presumably that is what happens) after the text is displayed it crams everything down into about half an inch, making it very unreadable. Sadness.
Reading through the comments, it seems there are some mobile modes I didn't know existed. They are not, however, what I would really look for, as they severely cripple the site. At a bare minimum, slashdot needs the articles, summaries, and comments to be slashdot-- the /palm version I tried has article titles (no summaries) that link to article summaries (no comments) that link to *only* the top 5 comments. That's not really worth bothering to use-- without all the comments, there really isn't much to slashdot.
:(
I was hopeful there for a minute that there was some wonderful mobile mode I'd never heard of that I could now use instead of Light Mode, but that's sadly not the case.
Okay, I know you guys are "trying" (even though CSS has been the norm for like what.. 5+ years now?), you've still managed to screw it up.
Slashdot looks uglier than ever. Spacing is inconsistent. The fonts look crappy. The boxes are all spaced apart on the screen. Everything in general just looks like it was done haphazardly without any concern for look and feel.
In short: You guys really screwed it up and made it worse than it was with just HTML.
Do something useful with subscriber revenue: Hire someone that knows what they are doing, and while you are at it, have them clean up Slashcode (I was getting 503's all night yesterday).
Old content is archived, this is (one reason) why you can't commenton stories from 1999.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Has anyone else noticed, if you click in the left column of a long thread (like this one) in Firefox, the stupid site will page down?
How can there be 13 errors when it isn't a friday?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I've been working on a website recently and it has left me hating HTML+CSS versus table based layouts for "liquid" layouts. Part of the problem is it is such and utter pain in the butt to center an item with CSS in liquid layouts. You have to do some weird margin tricks utilizing the size of what you want to center. If anyone has any advice, let me know. I have read a sizeable number of tutorials each with their own clever hacks and full on plagirisms.
I have a quick question, does slashdot use "position: relative" and margins exclusively for positioning? Why use "position: relative" over the default "position: static"? Thanks for any pointers and responses in advance.
I would like to plead (as I'm sure some other folks did already) against whatever redesign contest that is supposed to come along. I know that people will make all fonts crispy clean 8pt Verdana, make proper padding on everything, etc, but I would like at least an option to use the old site look. The current crufty look and Times New Roman text are part of Slashdot identity - it's not a yet another nifty glittering tech site. I've been on Slashdot for only 3-4 years, but I'm sure many veterans will also agree.
I am suggesting just keeping the current look as a display option; or maybe the default display option even. Who's with me?
The slashboxes seem a little too wide for the background image, at least in Mac Opera.
Constitutionally Correct
Hello,
I congragulate the slashdot team in moving to CSS. But the web page shows some quirks while loading in firefox browser - not all the time, but some of the time.
And I was expecting a design change. Isn't it high time for a design change for slashdot?
Linux Help
for all things on Linux
woohoo!
As I said during the beta, the New SlashCode is illegible on a Treo 650.
When I moderate, I only use "-1, Overrated". That way, I never get meta-moderated!
Design-wise, I don't really notice a difference on Firefox, at least on the home page (I see the comment post page is different). On Opera 8.5 (Windows), Slashdot now takes about 60 seconds or more to load (with broadband).
I *still* contend that there is some kind of "logic" that audo-moderates posts with certain keywords in it. Come on, my post was OBVIOUSLY a joke. I even put the wink at the end. There have been several other posts I have made in the past that were *immediately* moderated -1 flamebait, then later moderated up as funny or informative. If I had the time to post test messages with various keywords I would. Just curious - has anyone else experienced this?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I'm not sure if it's my slightly unusual setup (English vesion of Firefox on a Japanese language Windows XP) but the font on the main page looks absolutely terrible to me. Its very hard on the eyes. When I click through the "Read More" link it's fine though.
Just thought I'd let whoever may be reading this know.
If I hadn't seen such riches, I could live with being poor.
Well, now we've got slashdot on board. Whose going to tell Don Knuth?
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
All the brown nosing commments are getting good marks while constructive criticism is shot down as flame bait. I agree that if you are going to put all that work on the backend of the web site (the code), you might as well improve the GUI too. While we are on the topic of improving the site, how about putting in a spell checker?
Not sure what's going on, but every once in a while, the same story shows up twice on the homepage. Sometimes the wording is different, but it's basically the same story. Maybe you guys should use FrontPage to check your code.
PDHoss
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
If you had to write code.. then.. what the hell is the point of the CMS code? or does it just move all the old stuff over to static pages? That doesn't seem like a great idea.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
*Sigh* now slashdot won't look so good in my collection of old browsers. I actually used to rely on Netscape 3 on some slower computers until around the release of Mozilla 1.0. Well, at least the latest Seamonkey and Firefox Deer Park will run on Windows NT 3.51 Just try that with IE! :)
The site does appear cleaner visually as well, which is nice. The comments post page in particular is much neater and nicer. I'm absolutely overjoyed to find little or no use of "px" for fonts in the style sheets - and thus, I can finally read slashdot without having to force the font size up first. That'll make users with poor vision, and those with extremely high res monitors, very happy.
... kudos to the slashcode team. I know how hard cleanups (and presumably lots of refactoring behind the scenese) like this are.
So
Oddly enough the new ones scrolls slowly in MSIE (Is that by design also I wonder)
:-/
Generally things look a bit odd, though not totally a deal breaker (at least no fixed font sizes), good thing i suppose - I remember when Bluesnews changed to an awfull design, that was the last time i read it
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
One of my favourite GreaseMonkey scripts was the Slashdot Live Comment Tree script that allowed dynamic expanding and collapsing of slashdot stories. This made viewing of slashdot stories much more convenient. Of course it had it's downsides such as not working well with long discussions that were multiple pages long when viewed with low thresholds and broken moderation buttons. I guess, I either have to wait for a new version or roll up my sleeves and port it to the new format myself... in my abundant free time.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
The headlines for NEW articles are at least 3-4 font sizes larger than for the old articles. It kinda throws off the eyes.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
It'd be great if the content can be moved to near the very start of the document so that in an unstyled page, you don't have two pages of links to wade through before getting to the content. You have to get a little crazier with the CSS to get it to lay out better, but this would be the ideal (even better than a skip to content body link).
The new sight is great by unfortunately I am a person who has a hard time seeing small text. When I resize the text using Ctrl+Scroll Wheel the column (I have no HTML experience) with the articles in it gets really skinny and I have to scroll many times to get to the bottom of the page. Will this be fixed in the future or is there something that I can do about this?
bohemoth n: A bohemian behemoth.
I'm visualizing a 300-pound beatnik. ooo, that's nasty...OK, maybe that's a typical slashdot member...
Have you read my blog lately?
The comments pages (the "Read More" links) open up a lot faster in Firefox on my ancient PIII/800! Thank you!
:-)
The fonts are uglier. Spacing and alignment are less than perfect. It looks like the old website rendered by Opera.
I hope too much doesn't change with light mode, as it is far more readable than before on my Sidek!ck II. Please keep in mind that this device (aka Danger HipTop2) has no support for javascript or style sheets. CCS will have zero effect on these devices. I didn't have to change any settings, as I already had "light" & "no icons" checked for my home page. I don't see a setting for "handhelds" as indicated in the submission.
- Posted via Danger HipTop2 / T-Mobile Sidek!ck II -
"...Show some repect, coward! That's a 2-digit UID you're talking to!..."
Pah. Numerically low UIDs are just a kind of FIRST MEMBER!
Unless the UID is 1, YOU FAIL IT!
T&K.
Political language
looks like crap using lynx. Fancy CSS tricks, like changing the
style of an <li> to be 'inline' rather than 'block' causes wildly
different appearances under a graphical browser and a text mode
browser. Seriously.. if you don't check how your site looks in
lynx, or using a screenreader, or using some browser other than IE
and Firefox, then you're just doing people a greater disservice.
Anyway, it's not horridly annoying, and it is nice to see the change
around here.
That's because your browser is using Times New Roman, Slashdot doesn't pick a font for article/comment text.
Which is easy to change:
Firefox: Tools > Options, select General(FF1.0)/Content(FF1.5b), Click on Fonts & Colors(FF1.0)/Advanced(FF1.5), and choose Sans Serif as the Proportional Font, You can also choose which Sans Serif font you want below
IE: Tools > Internet Options, General tab, Fonts button, Change the web page font to one of your liking.
Too many zeros, not enough ones
well it looks quite nasty.
:)
congrats guys!
If you want to clean up your code more, all the menu items are anchors wrapped in list items. this can be much cleaner styled as:
As compared to:
BTW, nice use of fieldset.
Is anybody else using the Firefox extension Radial Context while reading slashdot? If so, is your pie menu now offset downwards about the radius of the inner circle?
Ya know, I've been having a similar thought:
:)
Considering I read Slashdot pretty much every day, I'm exposed to a LOT of information (correct or not...) about the posters here. Name, age, gender, occupation, location, you name it. Unfortunately natural language processing is nowhere near up to the task, so it'd have to be done manually. Still, it'd be pretty fun to compile a database over the next couple of years, with links to a particular post for any given information item.
Then, in the middle of an intense flamewar, start making the attacks personal. Real name, age, occupation, how many kids, pets... all with links to previous posts stating said information.
It would freak the hell out of a lot of people until everyone caught on. I'd become the Slashdot-stalker!
Seriously though, it would be interesting to compile some user data in this way. It's amazing what personal information people will give out on a message board over time, that they would never have considered if it was in a registration form.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Some credit is to be given for all the efford put but since you put the efford you you might as well used XHTML and CSS with all the fuss going on with standards compliant browsers.
No matter how you put it you are still behind..... Sad isn't it?
However, if you want to create a real "Hack Slashdot" opportunity, how about adding IDs to the comments reflecting:
For example:That way, we could (on client side) have CSS to highlight friends, or block trolls, or make +5 comments show up in bigger fonts, or whatever.
www.eFax.com are spammers
how many other people clicked "Reply to This" without any intention of posting.
it does look a little different!
but some of it (like the ads, and imports from other sites) just isn't ours to muck about with.
/me sighs
Translation: "we are too weak-willed and money-focussed to force advertisers to submit compliant code, and too lazy to transform imported code".
It wouldn't be hard to upgrade from HTML 4 to XHTML 1.1 Trans. Well worth it if there are no plans to change the code in the next 3-5 years. XML is the wave of the future...err present. Why not go XHTML Transitional to start, and strict later - if ya really wanna geek out on it.
Oh and in the words of Indiana Jones, old browsers (anything more than 3 years old) "belong in a museum." Old farts support old browsers, because that's the old way of thinking (ca. 2000). Fahgetaboutit!
Good work though!
Totally fucked in Opera 6. Half the front page is literally blacked out, on topic pages sometimes it works, sometimes black (as in black text on black background). I can only read and post this by toggling to "user mode" which is really ugly. Yeah, I know, I should upgrade; I've tried but have issues with later versions.
It is also broken on my Treo 650!! Just letting you know. Not an isolated incident.
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Benefits include medical, dental, and beta access to Duke Nukem Forever.
Send your resume and cover letter to:
hrjobs@hell.com
(666) 666-1234
Stylesheets can be cached. And what do you mean by "do not display properly"? The content is there. If you merely think your browser isn't rendering attractively, fix it.
And it even looks nicely under Konqueror. Yupi!
Here's a suggestion: make all links in a story submission automatically open in a new window. Everytime I want to visit a link, I have to right-click and open in a new window to avoid leaving Slashdot. It's a minor point, but I don't enjoy having to click Back-Back-Back when I forget to open it in a new window.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
Insightful? Creating table-less XHTML compliant websites is easier than mucking around with tables. And you end up with cleaner, easier to maintain sites that work nicely across pretty much any modern browser. And converting a table driven design is even easier.
Read up and learn
Would be really neat to have alternative designs to pick from a la CSS Zen Garden. You could have a design contest for the default and list all submissions as alternates in a sidebar.
No good at all. id is a unique id. Like name. What you want is exactly what class is for. You can have multiple class entries (including undefined ones) so your example would be
.mod_neg1 .Friend
<li class="comment Troll Insightful mod_4 Friend Friend_of_Foe" id="(comment #)">
Then your personal CSS file could have entries like so:
{
display:none;
}
{
font-weight: bold;
}
etc.
HitScan
Is it me, or has Slashdot readership been declining? I know that in the past (at least a year ago) this story would have racked up 1500 replies in about four hours. A lot of trolls complaining about the site. Or some know-it-alls giving their opinions as to why they could have done it better. Or some people saying "me too" to the various replies. But now, it seems like this story has been up most of the morning and there are only a few hundred replies.
I've also noticed that the journal community seems to be slowing down. I know that some people ARE leaving Slashdot based on the disappearance of a few friends. So, what's up? Yeah, we all know that Slashdot can suck at times because of the user base. But is there any place that actually shows you usage stats for Slashdot? I'm guessing it's usage is decreasing. If so, there's got to be a reason for it. Is there another site (not kuro5hin) that is drawing users away? So far I haven't found a good substitute, otherwise I'd leave too. But where else can you get into long, drawn out flamewars with people you don't know on *nix related topics?
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's turning into a morph of Godwin's Law.
Because it's my law, I will call it MFH's Law:
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
I use "light" view, and can't see any polls (in Konqueror). Anyone else having this?
I am trolling
Can't use height:100% in IE 5 and Opera 5. It creates large vertical gaps. In Opera 5 they are the size of the window, in IE 5 they can be enormous.
Also change Read More... from block-level list items to in-line elements like those seen between div class="commentSub" [ Reply to This | Parent ].
So this whole "Master of Transhuman" thing is something you're still working on? Or is all this irrational anger part of the system? I thought I got it, but apparently I missed the boat somewhere. Can you 'splain?
Curiously, the new code allows you to use some character entities in HTML comments, (¦©¼ÏÐ, so there!) but many are still filtered out. It's nice that I can now use a nice em dash instead of a tawdry double-hyphen — but why can't I use a Greek letter if I really need to?
>Let me be the first (post? ha ha)
Make sure you wipe Taco's jizm off your chin and lick his manwich clean when you finish.
>>We could go to XHTML, and someday we might, but today we're happy to just get to HTML 4.01 and CSS.
Nice to see the crack 'dot programmers make it up to 1998. Maybe in ten years, they'll actually implement 2004's technology.
I, for one, are certainly glad they're on VA's payroll instead of soaking up taxpayer money by being on the dole, 'cause their 'mad ach-tee-em-ell 4.01 skillz' would never stand up against a competent developer in the marketplace.
Come On, CmdrTaco.
Making a claim like "clean HTML" and blocking w3c's validaton tool? Bad optics for standards compliance...
In all fairness, when copy/pasting the HTML source, I got less than a score of errors, which IS an all time low.
Result: Failed validation, 16 errors
File: upload://Form Submission
Encoding: iso-8859-1
Doctype: HTML 4.01 Strict
This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Strict!
01
If opportunity came disguised as temptation, one knock would be enough.
3^2 * 67^1 * 977^1
Yep. You are right - I was misremembering a bit of CSS magic I'd seen, and I thought he was using IDs rather than classes.
Still, the basic idea stands - annotate the comments with class info so that they can be manipulated client side.
In the extreme, it would allow you to do away with a server access to change your comment threshold - you could have different stylesheets to show +5 through -1 comments, and then just select the stylesheet rather than doing a POST to the server.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Then this must be the year that Duke Nukem Forever will be released. Wooohooooo!
In a normal browser, that's fine and dandy. However, HTML itself (devoid of CSS) is read and used by other devices. For instance if I am browsing in Lynx, that list makes a huge difference in display and don't even get me started on voice readers and other things.
HTML is not there purely to be used as an anchor for style. It is there to explain what kinds of content a document contains. I mean, why use an h1 - h6 or a p or em or strong? You could simply create contextual style definitions for divs and spans which would, more or less, do everything that other tags do.
I mean really, if HTML was really just there for CSS all you'd need would be , , , , , , , and . You wouldn't even need since you could could just define inline divs.
The biggest thing I've noticed is the spacing of comments. They're very, very close together. A little more space between lines would make it much easier to read.
Other than that, congrats on implementing some standards!
Then, in Firefox, pick "No Style" from the "View" menu's "Page Style" submenu. The result is a super-clean, fast-loading site.
Amazing to remember the entire web was like this, circa 1995.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
So here's the key to all good web design, and indeed the design of the web itself: degrade gracefully.
Not every client will be using a browser that supports CSS. (Whether you think they should or not is not relevant, so you can skip all the grandstanding about how people should all "upgrade" to what you like and is appropriate to your circumstances.) Given that, it's vital to ensure that your design works properly and smoothly in such an environment.
The most obvious way in which neo-slash fails that goal is that the content is included in the worst possible order, and relies on CSS to rearrange it into something usable. Without CSS, I get to scroll past pages and pages of nav and sidebars before I get to the actual content of any page.
So this would be a great time to 1) fix your crap to be much more broadly usable, and 2) actually test stuff properly in the future before pushing it live.
Now if you view the site with a non-CSS-capable browser, you get pages and pages of useless crap before you get to the stories. Lynx shows that stories start on page 8 of 22 on the main page, and clicking to read a story has the story content starting on page 6 of 30.
With only a small amount of trickery, CSS lets you send the content in a different order than it is finally displayed. You probably can send all of the nav crap, sidebars, whatever last, not changing anything significantly for real browsers, but putting the interesting content first for lynx, w3m, and Googlebot.
-- Aaron
Aaron
I can't save the page in IE. File -> Save As... see error "The Web page could not be saved to the selected location."
create a shortcut on bookmarks toolbar an you are never more than a click away from eye-strain relief.
Turn it into a Greasemonkey script an you are never more than zero clicks away from eye-strain relief!
one hundred twenty
is just enough characters
to write a haiku
Please widen the comment history list on the "my slashdot" page.
I think everthing else is great.
Thanks for making the traditional slashdot look and feel one of the themes. That to me is slashdot
Looking good.
See here. Ok, that's a pretty old Browser, but it's also a pretty old Box and I won't upgrade it...
Seriously. A slight change in font sizes when Slashdot's loaded up for the first time that day, and it produces an almost Lovecraftian twinge in the hairs on the back of the neck: something's not right, and that can only lead to something horrible happening any moment...
You must think in Russian.
>>When I came on to Slashdot today, I thought something bad had happened at first. Glad to see it's actually just progress.
/.
Yes. I can see how "bad" and "progress" can be quite confusing - on
Troll or Funny? I believe it's called sarcasm (which is insigntful in my mind), but I already posted, so I can't moderate it.
You want secure and low requirements? Run lynx (or a variant) since that's not mentioned in the same discussion anyway. Seems fine to me after choosing light (which I used to use, and will turn back on when the slashboxes are back in it - don't need no stinkin' fancy graphics and layouts).
If he's really worried about Mosaic, I'd say he's using a 2400 bps modem, so images are just a pain anyway.
I am, and always will be, an idiot. Karma: Coma (mostly effected by
I'm running 1.0.6, so this might have been fixed in a later release of Firefox.
Here's the setup:
1. Move down the page on an article, past the point where there's nothing in the left-hand menu.
2. Position the mouse pointer in the menu area, to the left of a comment.
3. Click and hold the mouse, as if you're going to select text.
4. Move the mouse. ZOOOM! You're now at the bottom of the page.
Really, really irritating. It happens under Linux and Windows. Suprisingly, it doesn't happen under IE.
I don't want a Slashdot theme for my handheld, I want a simple HTML2.0-looking theme for my desktop. When I was forced to look at this new design, I wanted to vomit. Seriously, just give us the Light mode back, without any changes, thank you very much!
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The headline font is too big
hu ?
Can you name any inappropriately presentational elements in XHTML 1.0 Strict or XHTML 1.1?
No, but I can name a semantic attribute that was inappropriately removed from Strict:
If a web page describes an album, and the album's first track is numbered 13 (as in the case of Follow The Leader by Korn), then that's semantic information. And what about top-ten lists that start at 10 and go to 1?Ah, the change would explain why it displays so poorly in a narrow browser window. At least until you log in. I won't be annoying and recreate what it looks like, but you get a one or two word wide column of text with the right half of the browser wasted for the login, and so forth stuff that used to be a horizontal scroll off the screen. Yes, I'm probably the only person in the world who uses only one verticle half of his screen for his browser.
One of the best features of mozilla is the ctrl +/-/0 thing to control font size.
/. and judge for yourself but the new layout is a definate setback for me since I normally browse slashdot after increasing the font size.
Try it out on the old and the new
Take special note of what happens at the transion from italic to normal text after bumping up the font. The problem may be even worse when viewed in IE as that thing can have some really adverse reactions to italic text combined with CSS driven layouts.
Davo -- Free speech, free software, AND free beer.
just don't uncomment the ads that appear between every article on the homepage:
<p><!--#perl sub="sub { use Slash; print Slash::getAd(6, 0); }" -->
I'm waiting for #3141592.
Side note: Someone alert me when the admins wake up and delete this seemingly unused name. It was the one I really wanted.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
In this discussion, when viewing at threshold 1, on page 2 there's still the first post that you'd see on page 1.
Somehow it has to do with the overall length of the discussion. I just had tried with some other discussion which made it look like it was fixed, but it isn't.
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
The CSS attribute counter-increment is/was supposed to accomplish this, but browser support appears to vary.
Not only that, but now you have exactly the opposite problem from the one that CSS was intended to solve. An HTML document is supposed to have the same meaning when styles are turned off. Moving "It's On!" from track 13 to track 1 is not the same meaning, and inverting a 10. 9. 8. list to a 1. 2. 3. list is not the same meaning. Therefore, <li value="..."> is semantic, and encoding semantics in CSS is just as bad as encoding presentation in HTML.
Had I not actually gone through this process a number of times I would probably agree. But my experience has shown otherwise. The biggest problem isn't actually converting the design, the problem is troubleshooting the bugs (mainly in IE - peekaboo, guillotine anyone?) and finding workarounds. And as somebody that has been doing tableless designs for the past 4 years, no, CSS driven layouts are not easier. If anything they are harder because they don't require the insane levels of nesting and floating and THEN troubleshooting to get working. Tables just work.
Don't get me wrong, table-based designs suck and I have completely abandoned them, but as far as the ease of just throwing up a layout goes, I feel like it is infinitely easier to do a simple 3 column header / footer design with tables than it is with CSS.
But hey... YMMV.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
I found this quite interesting. I've been cranking out high volume net servers and custom systems for a decade or so, and only recently have I become enamoured enough with the ubiquity and utility of CSS, so that I am using it regularly in my daily design world.
:)
I tend to code for the lowest common demoninator, and these days, that is high enough that pretty extensive CSS stuff can be done (and tested on IE, Firefox, and Opera).
The *one* thing I wish CSS had, was a little more of the Tk-ish packer behaviour when it came to layouts. I always cringe when I say "position: absolute", but in the end, I manage quite nicely regardless...
Congrats to Slashdot, glad to see we're progressing with our faith in the ubiquity of specific technologies at a similar pace
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
[i]Now put yourself in the place of a Slashdot staffer who knows that he's not going to be able to force advertisers to rewrite their Javascript.[/i] I was trying ti up date a page I had done a while ago (2001?) that relied _entirely_ on document.write(). I had to abandon the project. Could you please point me in the direction of the appropriate substitute?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Just use the Firefox HTMLTidy Extension; it's just as good... just glance at the bottom of your screen and you know the status. I'd say after the web developer bar its the most useful.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Well, maybe, perhaps just a few more details ...?
the new http headers :)
X-FRY
X-BENDER
hehe
If you keep elephants instead of cats you need very large cat flaps.
>>> If you always use external files for scripts
Yes, you're right. Many imaginary situations are extremely complex. For a site like slashdot I'd have thought in the "many small scripts" scenario that a template engine (either before or at page-serving stage) of some form could drag in the necessary scripts (eg: this file called this function so I'd better add the script file, in which the function is defined, to the final served page). It would still seem cheaper to have separate script files. But YMMV.
...we'll see much dick-swinging from moroso.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
The (+) key for text and image enlargement /from within the Opera browser 8.50/ does not work as it did in previous version of Slashdot.
s/Google/Slashdot/ UserFriendly Mar 30 2004
Slashdot is unusable in Opera 7.55 on a Zaurus. I already submitted a bug report on this.
man, you're fag. heheh
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.7.9) Gecko/20050711 Firefox/1.0.5
Light mode is my default
Nothing besides the story/synopsis is visible, no nav, no funnies, no, well you get the idea.
Hope the rough edges will resolve soon.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
Eeek! My slashboxes are gone in the 'Light' view. Where did they go? Will they ever be back?
/. in Lynx-- yes, that was a text-mode web browser..."
I fear I'll be telling my children, "I remember when you could view
For the moment, I'll be suffering through the non-light view.
Did anyone else notice?
You do realize that the kindly individual was one of the guys that was in charge of implementing the changes that you're crying about, right?
Your post reminds me of the "You Stole My Fucking Cloudsong" guy. Just thought I'd mention it.
What would be cool is if you let people add their own CSS code. Each user would have the ability to save a little CSS magic to their profile and that code would be run when the user logged into the site or some crap.
First off, nice job guys. It's about time. :)
There's just a little touch that's missing. How about Slashdot's front page acts more like Google's customizable homepage? I know the AJAX bandwagon isn't something everybody wants to jump on, but this is an excellent application for that technology. I don't mean the front page should become a portal. Anything but. I mean that the front page is a bit more customizable beyond the existing UI like the up down arrows and the kill button for the what I call feed boxes on the right.
For example: a logged in user would be able to drag topics from the "Sections" menu on the left side of the page into the mini feed box area on the right. The feed boxes on the right could be draggable. The topic icons at the top could be dragged into the feed box area. C'mon guys, surely between all the know-how of the users and the site admins this could be accomplished. Embrace and extend!
You've got an easy breezy wind at your back...most of the time.
...is kinda special too. At least, I'd like to think so ;)
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
It's about time, anyways, I find it to very good news as I wrote a jounral entry here about this subject not too long ago. http://slashdot.org/~tubapro12/journal/114128
Please, please, please display years on your dates ... I can't believe this hasn't been fixed yet.
At least the site is still usable. I can still sign in via Links 0.99, and the articles and postings are still readable (actually, the comment sections are fine). I'm just disappointed that the main article screen has gone from extremely usable site that Links can handle in text mode with color to a stretched out vertical mess with no color information.
I'd guess that the staff limited themselves to GUI mainstream browsers when testing. Not a good move, IMO.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
If the content were first, the new site would be a lot more usable here in Links. That way I wouldn't have to flip by the first 4-5 screens just to see anything relevant...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Prettier dupes :-)
Table-ized A.I.
At least the comments are closer to the top when I change to "light" mode. That's helpful.
Not sure what I think of the
(
* Read More...
* 1100 bytes in body
* 562 of 695 comments
)
Sequences at the end of each story summary, tho. A Horizontal rule would look a lot nicer.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
I was really hoping that the little numbers, which supposedly relate to the pages of the specific articles, would bear some relation to the actual pages, but no. Same as always, Nums 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc are all ref'd to Page 1. Nice way to burn through the subscription deal that 'counts pages' to figure when you've used up your page count, though. Good one.
Meanwhile, although certain aspects of the interface look nicer, the 'go to' pages are drawing very oddly in Opera 8.5, which is odd, considering it usually draws anything, well, that comes anywhere's near being within wide limits of transitional code, or whatever. Find myself going to the 'next' page, seeing nothing all down the 'left' column, and hitting 'reload' every time.
Still, it's a step in the right direction... as far it goes, just hope you guys didn't break the code for all the 'other' browsers out here just to fix the crappy display that was happening before, in that other browser that's so happening/cool/great because it's 'better than IE", that everyone's so ga-ga about.
And still with the pukey Green... What's up with that? Don't tell me...um, your landlord/slumlord got a deal on ghetto green cuz it was a bit too dark for the projects? No? Okay, one of the 'designers' [term is used 'loosely'] spent some formative years in reform school, or did a stretch in juvey? Oh well, ya lose some, ya lose some.
Ah hah, I saw the bug reported with zero comments. If i don't log in I'm seeing 10 pages on this article (signified by: |1|2|3|...|10|) at the top of the page. But as soon as I login the numeric series of 'pages' runs from 1 to 35 , instead of 1 to 10. That's pretty odd, considering I can find no place in Preferences where I might have over-ridden the 'default' display.
Great design, /. ! At least with the old design the font was consistently sans-serif. I appreciate the serif bits are probably using browser default font but if you're going to change the font for part of the page, do it for the whole damn thing. I'm not changing my default font for the benefit of /. Serif and sans-serif do not work together, it just looks awkward.
In this world nothing is certain but death, taxes and flawed car analogies.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
You won't have to redo anything when the time comes that there is a benefit.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
I mean, they are just taking all the things we can joke/laugh about away piece by piece. Soon there will be nothing left to make fun of.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Posters should be required (not just "encouraged") to preview their posts before posting them.
In addition, a person who edits a post should be required to preview it again.
That is, put the "Submit" button in the "Preview Comment" area (maybe renamed to "Submit the Above Comment"), and leave the "Preview" button in the "Edit Comment" area.
A person who can't be bothered to preview his/her post shouldn't be posting in the first place.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I get a solid 350+k/s and instant response from other sites (Livejournal, Trend Micro, Apple, etc.) It's not on my end or my ISP's end. Maybe it's within the server hops I have to make to send the data, but I know for a fact it's not my ISP. /. is the only site that's slow to accept any comment I post.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
And logged in user (which you obviously are) can select from a wide variety of date formats, including many which include the year. I agree it's dumb that it's not the default, but at least you can fix it.
Search 2010 Gen Con events
Aaaaaahhhhh, heaps of thanks! Much better now. That was really starting to drive me barmy!
And now, I'm sure you and others like you are distraught that css is here to put more separation between content and presentation, and to provide accessibility to a wider range of devices and browsers with the same html, and your outdated revision of your browser is unable to cope.
/. is messed up in many browsers. Those people are just going to stop using /. instead of upgrading their hand held 'whatever'. There has always been a light version, how is it sooo unreasonable to still have a trim version, or an option to disable styles in preferences?!? No one has to hold back technology by providing a site that degrades well, or an option to turn off styles.
Don't give me that accessibility crap, it's just hype. As it stands now, accessibility has been decreased dramatically, which is the exact opposite of what you claim in sentence 8. Shoving everything into a DIV and loading eight pages of list items because someone said it was good for the blind and that it was accessible was obviously mistaken. CSS solves some problems, but at the same time, it creates accessibility problems.
A blind user can not be expected to reauthor every badly designed page they come to, nor should each user. A single user stylesheet should be all that's needed. I'm not getting into this.
The main benefit of CSS is to reduce bandwidth and simplify sight redesign. Slashdot only switched because of the hype and possibly the sight redesign benefits, after all, tables are going nowhere.
I was enamored when I discovered the power of CSS, and I started replacing all my table layouts. unfortunately I discovered that div layouts are not robust, appearance is unpredictable, and is a poor replacement for tables. I also discovered that people can be quite fanatical about standards that at times are counter intuitive.
You can blame the browser, or whoever. The fact is that
When people talk about progress, they generally mean forward, not backward. Alienating your user base is not a positive goal.
in just a few minutes slashdot could have a much cleaner look:d otcss.png
http://demmer.ipax.at/gallery/Verschiedenes/slash
i hope it does not take another 8 years to update that css.
A quicker way to apply a style with FireFox is to use bookmarklets.
.block so you can .block{display:none;} and if you want to get rid of all of them, just look up the class= that they are inside and .whatever, .foobar{display:none} them.
Copy and paste at squarefree's make-bookmarklet.
This method simply cascades or adds the styles with the existing styles, so the sidebars are still going to be there, along with any existing browser unfriendly code. If your browser just plain fails with the new slashdot, try to strip the styles using zap style sheets bookmarklet.
If you want to get rid of some of those side bars, some of them are in
Check my journal for a new stylesheet, it's not working when I post it here.
> it's not working when I post it here.
.css files using one of the extensions you nicely linked to (you need an extension to use a different CSS in Firefox? Unbelievable!) but it just makes the site look even worse! The first few pages are now a column on the left containing what should be evenly distributed along the full width of the page!
It looks a bit wrong there too! (Can't you use or something?)
I tried one of your
I just want a sort of light, text only display with no little columns of space wasted on either side of the screen. I know there's some sort of perverse standard in the web world to only use a third of the screen - something to do with making it `easier to read` apparantly - but it doesn't appeal to me.
it's not working when I post it here.
.css files using one of the extensions you nicely linked to... the site look even worse!
.block{display:none;} and that should get rid of most of the slashboxes, but login is in a .block, and some other sites use .block so it may interfere if you use it at other sites, and I try to design my sheets universal. If there was just a body class=slashdot I could make it apply only to .slashdot .block{display:none;}.
I tried tt and ecode, but they both didn't work, so I had to add spaces here and there to avoid slashdot braking the declarations. You can reformat it if you like.
(you need an extension to use a different CSS in Firefox? Unbelievable!)
I guess Mozilla thinks that it's complying with the spec because you can add styles to userContent.css and it will cascade them, but this is inadequate. There should be a way to override the authors styles according to the accessibility guidelines. Most people don't recognize the power of User CSS unless they're long time Opera users, so might not have occurred to Mozilla.
I tried one of your
The first two were geared towards the Original Light slash that used Tables. NeoSlash is the new one. I'm probably not going to do advanced layout because all the current HTML needs adjusting, so it would be a waste of time when they fix it.
The first few pages are now a column on the left containing what should be evenly distributed along the full width of the page!
Are you talking about how the side bars turn into list items? That's because people think it's semantic and accessible to put groups of links inside UL and LI, then use styles to change them from block to in-line elements that flow. Interesting theory, but ultimately it causes more problems when the style is removed, disabled, or unsupported.
CSS lets you put things anywhere, so those links should be at the bottom of the source, but I think that makes it hard to position in IE.
I just want a sort of light, text only display with no little columns of space wasted on either side of the screen.
Then use my stylesheet and ask slash to move the slash-box code to the bottom of the source... Or hide them.. Well, my sheet does add colors, but they're not too high contrast so they don't hurt my eyes.
I'm updating my NeoSlash Stylesheet to
Fine details again:
If you're using EditCSS, you have to:
Action, Clear.
File, Open...
If you Open without clearing, you will just cascade (Join) all the styles together. I tried to make my CSS work cascaded, but it's too much work to undo everything. Therefor, you should clear the styles in order to remove slash's layout.
3. With Web Developer extension it's more involved:
Disable, Styles, All Styles.
CSS, Add Style Sheet...
1. Bookmarklets are the faster way:
First go to squarefree.com...#zap_style_sheets and bookmark zap styles And then paste the styles at the User Style make-bookmarklet page and it immediately creates a bookmarklet from the stylesheet, so simply bookmark the link that it creates. The link is the text with the border that says zap colors. You should change the text to NeoSlash or what ever you want.
I will put another style up in my journal since posting CSS in comments gives errors. This time I removed all the '!important' from the declarations because It was hurting, not helping much, so you're going to have to clear the styles first or you might get author
Thanks for all your help.
I never got it working. I've just wasted 30 mins of my life - 30 minutes I'm never going to get back. I've installed extensions, gone to sites, cut and pasted text into boxs, clicked on links and got "bookmarklets" (whatever the hell that is - either it's a bookmark or it isn't) and it's just made Slashdot look worse! (I even had to reinstall EditCss after I uninstalled it, because if you uninstall it with the sidebar thingy open then there's *no way to close it*!)
At first I quite liked the idea of web browsers, and perhaps using a standard browser is a good idea if you want to look at hobbiest sites like blogs or whatever, but maybe it's time for people running sites like Slashdot, news sites etc to supply a program that's designed to view whatever their server spews out so it looks 100% as intended, and all customization is provided/allowed for by then? I'd happily lose the...uh..is "freedom" the right word?..of a browser if it meant Slashdot looked ok, banking sites were more secure etc.
Well, the bookmarklets are java scripts that you bookmark, then when you're on the page, you go to your bookmarks and click Zap Styles, then go to your bookmarks again and Click the NeoSlash style bookmarklet and it will apply the style to the page, presuming you've went to the links and bookmarked the scripts I mentioned. Sorry if I'm redundant. Just trying to be clear.
I've only tested the styles and font-sizes on Windows, but I'm guessing that you're seeing the long list of links when you remove the styles. That's not my doing, that's simply the new tradition. It's 1337 to put all your links as UL lists, then inline them with CSS. Never mind that it's an accessibility hazard. I'm currently using the light mode and there's no list-item junk before the content. You could make a complaint stating that you would prefer the content first.
Many CSS web pages today suffer from this problem of too many UL lists of links before the content, and with user CSS, there is really no way of getting around it, unless you're willing to design a layout for each page you visit, and since that's unreasonable, the best you can do is complain about it. Ask them to change them to inline elements or to at least move them to the bottom of the document source.
Slashdot, news sites etc to supply a program that's designed to view whatever their server spews out so it looks 100% as intended...
Since CSS support in browsers is sketchy, changing tables to DIVs is a huge headache, and pointless if they're not going to do it right so that it degrades in all browsers. They should have upgraded to HTML 4.01 Transitional, switched to Light mode (with tables) as standard and simply added a few class and ID attributes and added styles to that, and it would be smaller than it is now. I was dreading this move. Slash is currently a mess.
Now, I've went through and tried to display:none on many of the boxes, and inline the ones that are needed, like login. I hope this helps you.
/* removes all images */
img {display: none}
/* linlines some slashboxes */ .block * {display : inline; margin : 0; padding : 0; color:#603; background :#AAA; font:10px verdana;} .block li + li:before {content:" | "} .storylinks { background : #aba;} .storylinks * {display : inline; margin:0; padding:0;} .storylinks li + li:before {content:" | "} .storylinks:after {content:"[Make Bug Report: Storylinks should not be LI]"; font:9px verdana,sans-serif;} .btmnav * {display:inline; margin:0; padding:0; color:#603; background:#AAA; font:10px verdana;} .btmnav li + li:before {content:" | "} #jump, #jump * {display:inline; margin:0; padding:0; font:10px verdana;}
/* Removes some slash boxes */ :none;}
#topnav, #ostgnavbar, #advertisement-title, #advertisement-content, #slogan, #links-sections-content, #links-login-title, #links-login-content, #links-help-title, #links-help-content, #links-sections-title, #userlogin-title, #links-services-title, #links-services-content, #links-about-title, #links-about-content, #srandblock-title, #srandblock-content, #books-title, #books-content {display
body,td {font-family:verdana, sans-serif; font-size:12px; background:#aaa;} h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6, .title, a[name] b {color:#134; background:#889; font-family:XGeorgia, trebuchet MS; margin:0;} h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6, .title, a[name] b {padding:1px 2px; color:#bbc; background:#678;} a[name] b {display:block;} H1{font-size:2.4em; color:#800; background:#887;} H2 {font-size:2.2em; color:#9c0; background:#788;} H3 {font-size : 1.8em; color: #9CF; background: #969;} H4 {font-size:1.6em;} H5 {font-size:1.4em;} H6 {font-size:1.2em;