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Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards
Posted by
michael
on Sat Nov 22, 2003 12:02 AM
from the two-cents dept.
from the two-cents dept.
Joe Clark writes "Nearly a year after an interview with this correspondent highlighted a few problems with Slashdot's HTML, Daniel M. Frommelt and his posse have recoded a prototype of Slashdot that uses valid, semantic HTML and stylesheets. Frommelt projects four-figure bandwidth savings in the candidate redesign, were it adopted, not to mention better appearance in a wide range of browsers and improved accessibility. Next he needs volunteers to retool the Slashdot engine. And yes, he did it all with CmdrTaco's blessing." Slashdot has kept its HTML 3.2 design for a long time ("because it works"), but perhaps this effort will be a catalyst for change...
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Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards
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CTRL-R (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.tomservo.net/)
On second thought, that could mean more time working. Scratch the idea.
Re:CTRL-R (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.krisp.com/)
Then again, this is slashdot, and we don't read articles.
Re:CTRL-R (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Article (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.anotherbear.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 25 2003, @03:29PM)
Many languages have two articles, which correspond to English "an" and "the". Many of those languages have multiple forms, called "allomorphs," for each article, determined by context; in English, "an" becomes "a" before a consonant and "some" before a mass or plural noun. Russian has no articles, their function having been replaced by sticking nouns before the verb (to imply "the"-itude) or after the verb (to imply "a"-ness).
Another meaning of "article" is any of the interesting pages linked to in the story at the top of a Slashdot article.pl page. In this case, Slashdot users would call this page [alistapart.com] "the article".
Re:F5 (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 27 2005, @10:43AM)
a) Totally guessing, but about 99.9999% of the pages served up are interpreted by "no one" other than the browser. It's more "readable" by the browser minus the whitespace.
b) Most pages, like this, is "mechanically generated" - What you see in the final results was rendered: It isn't the "source-code". As such there is absolutely no code maintenance issues.
What you're left with is the prospect that maybe one out of every million page hits is going to a Slashdot developer who's debugging that the rendered properly, though if it's XHTML transitional then a XML editor would be a great choice and would again make it irrelevant if it's clogged full of waste whitespace.
Re:F5 (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.greece.k12.ny.us/taylor/topics/doubles
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/typespacing/a/onet
http://www.webword.com/reports/period.html [webword.com]
http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/011803.ht
Both the MLA and Chicago Manual of Style suggest one space after punctuation while using a compensatory font (ie, not-monospaced). Two spaces after a period is very out of style. Yeah I know - shocked the hell out of me when I learned it a couple years ago too.
Digital typography / spacing (Score:4, Informative)
In most well-designed typefaces, there is a certain amount of built-in space around punctuation glyphs, with the amounts chosen to match the other design characteristics of the characters to maximise reading ease. This gives you, amongst other things, a slightly wider space after a '.' (full stop/period) at the end of a sentence, which in turn gives a natural break while reading without being overly distracting. Note that in most typefaces, two full space characters after a full stop would give an excessively wide space, breaking the reading flow more than necessary, particularly where full justification is in use.
For the same reason, serious typography uses separate characters to represent full stops and (English) decimal place separators, and has another character for ellipses ('...'). If you used the normal full stop character singly as a decimal separator or thrice for ellipses, the spacing would be awkward.
Alas, this sort of detail is the bane of the typographer's life: they spend their days designing typefaces that are easy for you to read, without distracting artifacts, but most people will never appreciate the artistry involved, and only ever notice when they get it wrong.
Obviously, this can't apply when using a monospaced ("typewriter") typeface, because the designer doesn't have the luxury of fine-tuning the widths of characters. This partly explains why reading large blocks of text in a monospaced typeface is difficult for most people, and was also the reasoning behind using two full spaces in that context, although it's unnecessary with good proportionally spaced fonts.
If you'd like more information, you might try Microsoft's excellent Typography web site, or Donald Knuth's works on digital typography if you're really hardcore. There are excellent examples in each case of things that good typography will take into account to make for better readability, and of the distracting effects that can happen if you don't account for them. And as a bonus, once you've read Knuth, you'll know exactly how to typeset "e.g.," using TeX with perfect spacing. =:-)
This article is intended to be read by humans (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.anotherbear.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday November 25 2003, @03:29PM)
how about eliminating all of the completely wasteful, bandwidth and processor consuming, whitespace?
As you point out, XML, CSS, and ECMAScript, unlike Python, are not very sensitive to whitespace. Slashdot can mitigate whitespace's contribution to bandwidth in two ways: 1. mod_gzip (which Slashdot already uses), and 2. caching proxies that strip excess whitespace. But this article itself is intended to be read by developers, and clarity counts.
I'm just happy it rendered properly in Firebird.. (Score:5, Interesting)
The bit that impresses me more is that the page rendered properly with Mozilla Firebird 0.7 on Win32. The real slashdot doesn't render particularly well at all with Firebird for me.
*looks down* (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.dacels.info/ | Last Journal: Monday January 05 2004, @10:45AM)
Brr.
Just another example of the Slashdot monopoly... (Score:5, Funny)
This isn't the first time this has happened. Remember when BBS's became popular, and Slashdot "integrated" one into their site to kill any competition? Or all the times that Slashdot has brought down "competing" sites by linking to them, thereby safeguarding their website monopoly?
It's a shame that the DoJ let them off for this....
Not complying with any HTML standard (Score:5, Informative)
That's not true [htmlhelp.com].
Re:Just another example of the Slashdot monopoly.. (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
However, someone sufficiently motivated can rip it out and slap in something new. Sometimes people end up rewriting amazing portions of software when it's big enough. I'm not sure slashdot really does enough to warrant that kind of manhandling, it might be better to start entirely over.
But then, I've never looked into slashcode, because while slashdot is a fine site, I would never want to run it. I'll learn a lot more if I write my own code, and I don't have lofty goals for my website.
While you're at it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:While you're at it (Score:4, Interesting)
If page 1 has: thread A with 14 subcomments, thread B with 22 subcomments, and thread C which has 17 subcomments, but...
there's only room (based on the max page length) to show A, B, and 13 of C's comments...
Page 2 will start over with the first comment of thread C. So you get to reread the first 13 of C's comments.
All hell breaks loose if thread C has more comments than can be shown in a single page...
Each page wants to start at the top of thread C again.
The problem is slash won't start page N in the middle of a comment thread. Any comment thread that was only partially displayed in the previous page is reshown in its entirety.
very annoying.
The one reason I can't give /. urls to friends (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.devphil.com/)
is that the default comment view (i.e., when you don't have an account) is non-threaded, oldest first. Which is just stupid. People visiting are treated to pages of whatever the current first-post troll is these days.
Switch the default to threaded, highest scores first, and then if a visitor wants a more chaotic view, they can deliberately ask for it.
Re:Sounds good (Score:4, Informative)
(http://www.wuputah.com/)
I'm not sure if this is settable in IE, but Mozilla, Safari, etc etc have these settings.
Personally, I use serif, and then my serif font is Georgia. It looks great to me. But feel free to use sans-serif and Comic Sans if it suits you.
well (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.moolicious.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday March 26 2003, @01:51PM)
How about a new look altogether?
I had a look at the new site, and while it does fix many problems and should certainly be used to replace the existing setup, why not go a little farther and retool the look of the site as well?
The look of slashdot has barely changed since the late 90's, and while the look certainly brings part of it's character, it's beginning to look dated. Perhaps it can be redesigned with a more effecient and cohesive interface while still retaining some of it's previous character?
Or is it just a pipe-dream...
Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.dacels.info/ | Last Journal: Monday January 05 2004, @10:45AM)
Re:well (Score:5, Informative)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Re:well (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ganjablogger.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday January 05 2006, @05:36PM)
universal access (Score:5, Funny)
The prototype is slowing already (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The prototype is slowing already (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.imperialdispatches.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday July 26 2005, @10:17PM)
Re:Explains some stuff (Score:5, Informative)
It scans through the page and tries to match the character frequency against average character frequencies for various languages. If you're seeing Slashdot as Big5, then that means IE thought that the character frequency matched Big5 most closely.
Re:Explains some stuff (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday March 31 2003, @01:23AM)
A sad testament to how bad Slashdot grammar is... Next time someone asks you how bad the writing is on Slashdot, you can tell them "It's so bad my browser thinks it's Chinese!"
Hallelujah! (Score:5, Insightful)
Now maybe I'll finally be able to change my
Re:Hallelujah! (Score:5, Interesting)
And do you do it with a reader that doesn't interface directly with IE's rendering engine rather than reading the HTML directly?
Despite running some very information-centric sites, I have yet to see a confirmed assistive technology surfing my site in the logs--yes, I know all about spoofing, which is why I ask...you'd think that some of them, given the Biblical proclamations about standards liberating the handicapped that come from ALA, would just be a HTML-slurpers that give a unique identifier to logs and simply break on IE-only sites.
So, any of you out there? Is the site unusable on JAWS or some such? I want real blind people who use it every day rather than somebody who once listened to JAWS read it in a lab or academic setting.
Re:Hallelujah! (Score:5, Informative)
Tidying posts (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://folk.uio.no/kjetikj/ | Last Journal: Thursday October 28 2004, @05:00PM)
I hope they implement ASAP.
But there is another challenge, and that's the posts people write. Anybody care about their code? For example, quoting, to do it properly, one should write: <blockquote><p>blah, blah</p></blockquote>. That's an awful lot of typing.
A page is not going to validate unless the posts are correct.
The way I have planned to do this on one of my sites, is to make sure that every time somebody clicks "Preview" or "Submit", the post is handled to Tidy [sourceforge.net] for sanity checks and conversion. By using preview, you can correct you're code, but you can never submit something that isn't well-formed.
I'm using Perl too, not Slashcode, but AxKit [axkit.org]. Nevertheless, a good Perl implementation of Tidy is still lacking. There is a HTML::Tidy [sourceforge.net] project page on Sourceforge, but it hasn't really gotten off the ground.
Does anybody else want to work on this, or do you have other ideas for cleaning up posts?
Agent sensing (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://pyile.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday December 19 2006, @01:33PM)
When the time comes, please add some code to switch to a light design when browsing with a PDA. I know right now you can select light mode, but it affects all browsers used from an account which isn't at all what I want...