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.

Comments

Well, I guess I have the best compliment

[OS24Ever]

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.

Re:So that is why

[a.ameri]

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?

Re:HTML 4.01?!

[Lewisham]

This is a lot like the argument for why bothering to comment, or why bothering to make code easy to understand, or why bother to code a web page in a half-arsed way as long as IE renders it OK.

Because its the Right Thing To Do.

Sure, it works fine as is. That's great. But if you can code in XHTML, why not? There are no good reasons not to apart from the fact you are lazy (I don't buy any of the arguments from that .ch site). Good HTML will look almost exactly like XHTML, why not make that extra step?

XHTML enforces nice, clean code. None of the HTML fanboys can argue that. It can be parsed nicely in an XML parser, making it portable into all sorts of applications, from automagic web spiders making massive search engines, to little Java programs. HTML makes parsing more complicated, and the error handling an even bigger pain. Getting everyone to XHTML, especially technology flagwavers like /. should be easy.

No, you don't have to do XHTML. But you should.

Re:Redundant UL and LI in menus

[Bitsy Boffin]

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.