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.
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.
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.
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!
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make install -not war
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.)
Well they fixed it for Firefox but they added it in for IE (purposefully probably). I've seen it twice now.
I would be very interested to know wheter this change has a big effect on the slashdot bandwith usage.
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.
I also recommend that people start sharing their own user-defined stylesheets (like they've done with Gmail), so this site no longer looks like crap.
Like a CSS Zen Slashdot.
Joe
http://www.joegrossberg.com
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?
On my Pocket PC, slashdot looks orders of magnitude better (I never use the /palm one, I like my images!). However, in PIE it needs to be set to 1 column mode. But, I feel very glad that I can get a decent looking news aggregator on the go without having to scroll nastily.
This was done awhile ago, and almost no one noticed.
Basically, we were allowing various things in comments for years that were not compliant with HTML 4.01 strict. Even moreso for stories. So about six months ago we fixed the code to force compliance with HTML 4.01 strict, and about two months ago converted old content accordingly.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-style/200
But he bought it on ebay
There are several browsers (and other tools, like XML parsers) out there that will break if an XHTML format doesn't validate as perfect XML. Since Slashdot does not control all of the code they pull in (especially ads, but also comments - neither of which are guaranteed to be valid XHTML), they want to play it safe.
Have you read the Moderation Guidelines Addendum?
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.
"I reject your reality, and substitute my own" - Adam Savage