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.
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
Granted, THIS change got some testing time, but there are Thursdays when things happen, like not being able to submit replies, or replies are submitted and not seen. Things like that are obviously hardly tested, if tested at all.
Its pretty obvious, in my opinion, that there is no formal testing process, and only when something major is released are they even inclined to ask for testing help.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
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
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.
umm.. you need a light version? make a stylesheet for it.
besides that, now that it is html/css, this site probably weighs in at near the size of the light version now.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.
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!