Deconstructing Blogger Beta's HTML

Scott Wilkinson writes, "Google's Blogger is going through a major revamp, called Blogger Beta, with lots of nifty new graphical layout features and pesky bugs to annoy the users. Yesterday they finally opened up the HTML code behind the Beta, and it's a significant departure from the traditional Blogger. This post at Banana Stew deconstructs the Blogger Beta code and points out some nice new features like if-then, loops, and object-oriented structures."

Comments

If-Then-Else

[colonslashslash]

Whoa.... if-then-else loops!? Truely, a marvellous new feature from Google that will revolutionise the intertubes. What an awesome age of technological advancement we live in!

Re:If-Then-Else

[CastrTroy]

Does this remind anybody else of ColdFusion? (the language)

Re:If-Then-Else

[SuperBanana]

Whoa.... if-then-else loops!? Truely, a marvellous new feature from Google that will revolutionise the intertubes

I beg to differ; it's perfect for the blogging crowd.

IF $mood == "angsty" THEN display(AngryKittenGIF), SetBackground(Black)

Re:If-Then-Else

[xENoLocO]

Why bother to run a conditional against a public static final?

Re:If-Then-Else

[Americano]

The problem is, the blogging crowd doesn't NEED "if-then-else" loops:

$site_name = "Black Icicles In My Heart";
$mood = "angsty";

SetBackground(BlackWithSilverRosesAndLightning);
display(AngryKittenJPG);
display(SunnyDayRealEstateJPG);
display(JimmyEatWorldJPG);
display(DeathCabForCutieJPG);
printBlog("Sigh. My parents just don't understand me, and how hard it is to be young today! Sometimes I think only MTV gets me.");

See, there's not a SINGLE conditional everywhere... they're unconditionally angsty. :)

My Eyes!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The page layout made that article was completely unreadable. I was about to turn off CSS when I realized that the article is basically a huge table of non-tabular information. What a waste of time.

Re:My Eyes!!!

[Khuffie]

CSS is all good and well, and I do my best to make my designs fully CSS, but at times, it's just far, far easier to use a table than to spend hours putting in hackneyed CSS code that won't be 'valid' in the end just to get a simple thing done.

Not really too interesting if you RTA

[x3nos]

1. Beta has been out for awhile . . . missed the scoop - too little too late IMO
2. How pointless is it to comment on commented code?
3. Author of TA didnt really get into a lot of the features like Labels, modifiable templates from an AJAX control, blah blah
4. For once I actually did RTA and I think Ill go back to just making flippant comments about comments

Now about Beta - my big gripe is the continued lack of xhtml compliance on the part of the blogger developers. I go through the extra 5% effort it takes to ensure my code validates. It makes things easier on the end user, and its just good best practices. Despite several years of complaints by bloggers, they [Google] have yet to enforce compliance with their blogger product.

Re:Not really too interesting if you RTA

[nursegirl]

What particularly drivs me batty is that they just hired Douglas Bowman as Visual Design Lead in May. He's been at the head of the XHTML/CSS progression/revolution for years, including the Wired News redesign in 2002.

I understand that it takes some time to get settled into a new workforce, so Bowman might not have had the time to get around to working on Blogger that much yet. According to his blog, he appears to have spent the first half of this year working as a contractor on Google Calendar. I just wonder, why wouldn't the Blogger team have waited until their Design guy/standards-compliance guru was free before rolling out this beta?

Feeds need more work

[Henry V .009]

They still haven't gotten the site-wide comment feed working yet. You can turn it on in the Blogger controls, but no link for it is provided anywhere. You have to guess the url from the post feed and the individual post comment feed.

Even after that, I found that it only lists the first 25 comments ever made to my blog. This makes a recent comments sidebar hard.

Whether this will ever get fixed, I don't know. Google uses "beta" to mean "released" for all their software and the practice sucks. I have the feeling that a lot of their free "beta" software will one day become non-free, and they will only at that point "release" it.

One problem...

[Andrew Nagy]

The new blogger beta doesn't allow you to host the blog on your own site anymore....

Re:One problem...

[SuperRob]

That's untrue. Blogger will still allow FTP posting to off-site servers, but many of the new features will not work as a result. Google stated that they were committed to continuing FTP posting

View Source

[Nom du Keyboard]

Opened up the HTML code behind it? Just how hard is it to View Source?

Amazing!

[Peganthyrus]

Blogger has a templating language now! How terribly newsworthy.

It's not like any blog system before this ever had conditionals!

Bonus points to the article for putting a table in monospaced Flyspeck 3 and having it in the middle of a design that completely breaks when you bump up the text size.

Deconstructing Blogger Beta's _Template Language_

[adnonsense]

Reading the Slashdot summary it sounds like Blogger has introduced a new sort of HTML. One with if-then, loops, and object-oriented structures. Ferchrissake, when people tell me they can "program in HTML" I ask them to write a for-loop for me... it's Blogger's new template language TFA's talking about here.