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 XHTML?
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.
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
Why don't you guys have a formal testing process in place for slashcode?
I'd prefer that they worry less about standards compliant code, testing, and other bullshit and instead work on eliminating worthless editorials, duplicate stories, and any number of other far more important issues to make Slashdot better.
It's nice to see that they are working on *something* but it *was* working all those years just fine. It's just been the last two years that Slashdot has gone *really* downhill with stuff that has nothing (or little) to do w/the codebase.
NS 4 nearly has no support for CSS. That's why the "new slashdot" (heh, never thought I would see that phrase) looks crap in it.
Seriously, don't you think it's time to drop support for NS 4? I mean this is the slashdot crowd, that has been saying for the last 8 years that developers should comply with standards and don't tune web pages for a specific browser, and now that finaly it is compliant with the standard, you are complaining that it looks bad in an ancient browser? You know, slashdot now also looks completely crap on BeOS's netpositive. should I complain about that as well?
--
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...
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
I see it the other way around. I loaded it up, read articles, clicked the links, changed the filtering, etc, and it all worked just fine.
I think Misagon should have been more clear that he didn't like the way it looked instead of saying that it was broken, because it's clearly not broken. The plain HTML style for Netscape 4.x is very common these days, any Netscape 4 user should be used to it by now.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
Err, except the way it is now is semantically correct - it's a list of links. Your way it's just a bunch of links all mooshed togethor with no semantics at all.
There is a lot of "div-itis" though, but I'm guessing that was to provide flexability for user defined stylesheets in the future, so can be forgiven i guess.
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Also, the order of the buttons has changed
Oh good, it's not just me.
is that to get us double checking
If they wanted to do that, you'd think they'd simply not show a Submit button until after the first Preview.
Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
Please, please, please display years on your dates ... I can't believe this hasn't been fixed yet.