Help Beta Test Slashdot CSS

After almost 8 years, Slashdot's HTML is finally getting an overhaul. For now the changes are almost entirely under the hood, as we migrate the current skin to CSS. Slashdot itself will migrate in the next few weeks, but for now, we'd appreciate it if people who understand CSS could take a look at Slashcode. If you use a browser that lets you select a stylesheet, you can take a look at that site with the Slashdot CSS Skin. Keep in mind that Slashcode doesn't look exactly like Slashdot, so there will be some differences between that site, and the final version that will appear on Slashdot. We're mainly looking for feedback on compatibility issues and blatant bugs. You can use our our SF bug tracker to submit bug reports. Thanks for your help. Once we move Slashdot, work will begin on a new look & feel. If you have ideas, you could start playing with the CSS stylesheets now!

Just one question...

After almost 8 years, Slashdot's HTML is finally getting an overhaul.

What is a HTML?

Sigh

Of course I know what HTML is. I was trying to be funny (appearently wasted effort). The joke is that HTML is old. For slashdot to only be using HTML makes it old. Something so old that people forgot about it.

Oh nevermind.

Re:Sigh

Ages ago. Go to Preferences -> Homepage (or just click here [slashdot.org]), and set Date/Time Format to something other than the default. And then forget to click Save.

css!!

If you do change to CSS beware as some CSS is IE specific, like list trees.

Re:css!!

Doesn't everyone on Slashdot use IE?

(sorry)

Re:css!!

The "design for all browsers" paradigm isn't a good one. It promotes the use of non-compliant browsers. It's much better to design to the standards no matter what.

Re:css!!

Thank goodness everyone's customers use standards compliant browsers. Whew! Your theory would be totally ridiculous if they didn't.

[/sarcasm]

Re:css!!

If you think about it, his theory would be totally unnecessary if they did.

Incidentally, I agree with him -- designing web sites for broken browsers is like giving illegal immigrants drivers' licenses: it's stupid and it doesn't fix the underlying problem.

Re:css!!

No, you should design for standards, and then sit back and relax. Let it look suboptimal in non-compliant browsers; it'll give them incentive to upgrade.

This, of course, assumes that the bugs in the non-compliant browsers result in only cosmetic defects; however, I would say that if something is so broken in IE that it's genuinely unusable, then you should try approaching the problem in a completely different way.

Standards Problems

I discussed this with a friend some six years ago. The problem with standards like HTML and CSS can be summed up in one word:

MAY

By putting the word may into a standard, you make the standard non-standard. If you can't reliably depend upon CSS to render a dashed line on a border, why do you even provide it? Two completely compliant browsers can give you a different picture, depending on their choice to implement optional components.

There are enough issues with non-compliant browsers that we don't need to build issues into the standards!

Re:Standards Problems

If you can't reliably depend upon CSS to render a dashed line on a border, why do you even provide it?

Do share: just how do you propose to get a blind user's screen reader to render a dashed line on a border?

Wait, wasn't that what you meant? Oh dear, it looks like you're going to have to concede that you don't actually want CSS to guarantee anything of the sort, doesn't it?

Two completely compliant browsers can give you a different picture, depending on their choice to implement optional components.

Oh lord, you're not another of these clueless people who think that the idea of CSS is to make sure sites look identical everywhere, are you?

The fact that two completely compliant browsers can produce totally different results is a feature. You might want your website to have green text on a red background in letters five pixels high, but if I'm nearsighted and colourblind, I damn well don't want my browser to render it that way! As a less extreme example, you might want your site to be laid out in three vertical columns, but if I'm browsing it on a mobile phone, I sure won't object if my browser decides to render it as one column instead.

Pixel-identical rendering? You can keep it. I want to use fonts I can read, colours I can stand, layouts I can navigate. CSS lets me do all that just by providing my own stylesheet. You know, I'm really not terribly unhappy with that.

mod parent up

Cheers. Save perfectly identical rendering is not the realm of HTML/CSS. There are plenty of technologies out there that allow full control over layout. A bitmap comes to mind.

But I think there is a point somewhere in there to be made. Remember HTML 1.0? Simply the fact that tags like STRONG, H1-H6, and ADDRESS exists points pretty clearly to the intent to allow a site to describe what was being presented but allow the browser to determine how it was presented. Of course, there were a load of problems with this and people's ideas of how it should be used, and we like to think we've come a long way. But in truth, we're still doing the same things.

Rather than trying to be the control-freak with everything exactly positioned, it's far more useful (and elegant to program) to have a site which can do without X, Y, or Z and still convey all the information it did before. A site that degrades gracefully may not impress the casual user, but the casual user will be able to use it.

Look at the most successful commercial sites out there today. Google's front page and search results are viewable in every possible browser I can come up with. eBay is one of the ugliest sites in existence, but its content is available to nearly any browser. Hit amazon.com with Lynx and you can still buy things.

Successful web sites are not pretty. They're functional. CSS is a tool to make more functional pages. Yes, you can also make them prettier, but if you set out with that as your goal, you'll fail the more important one.

Re:css!!

Right, so the intelligent thing would be to explain to my clients that it's Microsoft's fault and not mine that the site I just designed for them doesn't display properly for 9 out of 10 of their customers? After all, I followed the standards and it would be stupid not to!

"Sorry Mr. Client, standards evangelism is far more important to me than your customers. Now, when should I be expecting payment?" Yeah, that'll fly.

I think I'll keep using my current methodology: Design to the standards first, then add whatever hacks are needed to handle the various browser bugs in secondary stylesheets to ensure the widest possible compatability across as many browsers and platforms as I can.

Call me crazy, but keeping the client and their customers satisfied (and, as a result, making the site display properly for as many visitors as I possibly can, rather than just those that use a "standards compliant" browser) and subsequently getting paid for my work is more important to me than beating the standards drum.

Re:css!!

Personally I design to standards and then detail the charges for the time it takes me to fix it on IE in the final invoice. Then the client knows exactly how much the use of IE is costing them as a percentage of the total cost of the project.

It doesn't cost them anymore than before, but it really opens their eyes.

Bob

Re:css!!

The way I design web pages -- and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone, doing something very radical here! -- is to design for Gecko-based browsers and Safari first, because they very rarely show major deviances from one another or standards. Then I take the design to Windows IE and tweak the style sheets to account for anything that broke there, which is usually pretty minimal--frustrating, but its quirks are known and well documented. And I make sure the page is readable and usable in Lynx. At the end of the day, I have fine standards-compliant XHTML and CSS that works everywhere from Firefox to the Sidekick.

In almost all cases you can make IE happy without having to seriously compromise. There are broken browsers I'm perfectly happy to ignore: pre-Mozilla Netscape, pre-5.0 IE, NetPositive for BeOS, HotJava. These are ones that you simply can't tweak for; generating web pages that renders perfectly on all of those platforms can be done, as OS News proves -- and can only be done by creating hideously bloated web pages where 70-80% of what's being sent to the browsers is markup, as, uh, OS News proves. (The term "pathologically compliant" comes to mind.)

Re:css!!

"Design for standards" paradigm isn't a good one. It promotes looking for consultants that won't drive away business.

Re:Fortunately

<rant>

Absolute nonsense. I implement sites for major commercial organisations which use standards-based CSS 1 and 2.1, and they work just fine cross-modern-browser - IE-Win, IE-Mac, Opera, Firefox, Safari, you name it. And when I say "just fine", I mean "look identical to the pixel", as well as scaling seamlessly for visually impaired users, being fully accessible to assistive technologies, having semantically pure markup and degrading gracefully in ye olde browsers.

On my current project I combine floating, absolute positioning and just about every other CSS technique in the book, and out of 1800+ lines of CSS across the entire site, just 13 are to cater for IE's brokenness.

Everything one needs to know to make standards-compliant sites that work in today's browsers is out there (including avoiding the IE-5-Win box model problem), but many "web designers" are so lacking in an understanding of the technologies with which they work that they can't or won't improve. I see new sites produced using nested tables, for goodness sake; I used those techniques myself last century when there was no alternative, but these people really need to get with the programme.

It's the same problem that leads to so many useless implementations in any field: the vast majority of people are unwilling to undertake a process of constantly improving and refining their skills, and the employers aren't sufficiently well-informed to make the distinction between those who work hard to make the best possible use of the available technologies, and those who read a book about HTML in 1997 and have been marking time ever since.

Luckily things are now changing, and clueful organisations are demanding people who can work with standards. A lot of people who think they understand how to produce a web page are going to be looking for alternative employment over the next year or so unless they catch up on the advances made over the last few years.

</rant>

Thank you for listening; have a nice day :-)

Re:Fortunately

Taken from A List Apart:

"Perhaps the biggest benefit of this particular example is the bandwidth savings:

        * Savings per page without caching the CSS file: ~2KB per request
        * Savings per page with caching the CSS file: ~9KB per request

Though a few KB doesn't sound like a lot of bandwidth, let's add it up. Slashdot's FAQ, last updated 13 June 2000, states that they serve 50 million pages in a month. When you break down the figures, that's ~1,612,900 pages per day or ~18 pages per second. Bandwidth savings are as follows:

        * Savings per day without caching the CSS files: ~3.15 GB bandwidth
        * Savings per day with caching the CSS files: ~14 GB bandwidth

Most Slashdot visitors would have the CSS file cached, so we could ballpark the daily savings at ~10 GB bandwidth. A high volume of bandwidth from an ISP could be anywhere from $1 - $5 cost per GB of transfer, but let's calculate it at $1 per GB for an entire year. For this example, the total yearly savings for Slashdot would be: $3,650 USD!

Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive."

Too many IE users to not work around IE bugs.

Allow me to list people who would be denied the goodness of slashdot if you didn't create something that allowed IE to be compatible:

1) People who for some stupid reason or another can only use IE at work and don't have enough control of their PC to install something better.
2) Geeks and nerds who do not fall into the category of computer nerd. There are science geeks, english geeks, political geeks, math geeks, but just because one is a geek about one thing doesn't mean they are geek about computers.

I'm all for scolding IE for not complying to standards, but since MS's philosophy of embrace, extend and extinguish is still in use in IE, don't allow yourself to be extinguished by designing a page that doesn't work around I.E. bugs and cut off major portions of your audience.

Will the beta bring the site down?

Just about every site remodel has problems. I have just gone over the list of things I have issues with on our local public school's new website. Most of my comments have to do with broken capabilites. I'm sure that the folks at /. have tested this system in a non-production environment, but things are bound to go wrong at first. The unfortunate thing about my local school district's website has been access. How much of the /. staff resources are going to be committed to the rollout and how soon are problems going to be addressed?

Considering the fact that it took nearly two minutes for the form to arrive makes me think we are in for a bumpy ride!

Re:Will the beta bring the site down?

Slashcode has been slashdotted!

For all those wishing to read the original article, the contents have been replicated in a modified format here [slashdot.org].

Oh My God, It's Actually Happening!

CmdrTaco? I have exactly two words for you.

This. Rocks.

Kudos on finally bringing Slashcode into the 21st century! The Slashdot style over on Slashcode looks absolutely wonderful, with none of the chunky layout problems that plague Slashdot itself! What I'd love to know is, how much bandwidth are you saving by using CSS? Many of the experiments done to date suggest that you could cut your bandwith usage by 30-50%! Will this update usher in a new era of faster page loading? Inquiring minds want to know! :-)

Re:Oh My God, It's Actually Happening!

Considering the fact that the Slashcode servers are now a pile of smoldering ash, I'm guessing they haven't saved much bandwidth

Re:Oh My God, It's Actually Happening!

CmdrTaco - "Do you smell something?"

CowboyNeal - "Oh Sh*t! The slashcode server's on fire!"

ROFL

Re:Oh My God, It's Actually Happening!

*one day passes*

Zonk - "Oh Sh*t! The slashcode server's on fire!"

Re:Oh My God, It's Actually Happening!

So I'm going to be modded as flamebait here but um, honestly, "This Rocks"? My first reaction is, ABOUT GODAMNED TIME?

I mean, couldn't they have found any time in the past 8 years of triple posting the same article, not performing any due diligence regarding fact checking, etc... to fucking fix their html???

Thanks Rob Malda et all, welcome to the 21st century!

Mod me down, but you know it's true.

 

Re:Oh My God, It's Actually Happening!

No WML. Less styles than CSS Zen Garden. Lame.

Maybe adding a little JS ...

for things like collapsing articles to header only and expanding them to full article? (And user options for the initial view)

Re:MOD PARENT UP

Got it finally: http://greasemonkeyed.com/tag/slashdot [greasemonkeyed.com]

IMarv

Re:OMFG

Slashdot going to CSS? Has hell frozen over!? Windows gone GPL!? What's next?

I'd answer, but I'm too busy trying to catch these damn flying pigs!

XHTML

Just curious -- not attacking or anything -- but why HTML 4 as opposed to XHTML 1 Strict? Is it because of the content type issues with a certain browser, strict XML compliance was too difficult, or simply that only purists ever seem to care? ;-)

Re:XHTML

that has to be the lamest excuse for a list of reasons why not to use something.

Re:XHTML

Hey that guy has a website on the Internet he must be right

Re:XHTML

That is one of the most ridiculous articles on web authoring that I've ever read. The author's logic seems to mainly stem from the fact that IE has extremely poor standards compliance. Of course it has poor support for XHTML: when IE was last released (6.0) XHTML was still brand-new.

This guy is seriously arguing that people should not adopt a now mature standard, because one aging piece of software hasn't been updated in four years? He just needs to get over his love affair with IE and realize that the rest of the world is still progressing.

Addmitedly, I don't know when the article was written, but that's only because the author didn't date it. To argue that XHTML is bad because old UAs poorly support it is truly a case of the tail wagging the dog. I can hardly believe that the author doesn't understand that.

Re:Why do this?

Um, because: [alistapart.com]

Though a few KB doesn't sound like a lot of bandwidth, let's add it up. Slashdot's FAQ, last updated 13 June 2000, states that they serve 50 million pages in a month. When you break down the figures, that's ~1,612,900 pages per day or ~18 pages per second. Bandwidth savings are as follows:

* Savings per day without caching the CSS files: ~3.15 GB bandwidth
* Savings per day with caching the CSS files: ~14 GB bandwidth

Most Slashdot visitors would have the CSS file cached, so we could ballpark the daily savings at ~10 GB bandwidth. A high volume of bandwidth from an ISP could be anywhere from $1 - $5 cost per GB of transfer, but let's calculate it at $1 per GB for an entire year. For this example, the total yearly savings for Slashdot would be: $3,650 USD!

Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive.

Re:Why do this?

Remember: this calculation is based on the number of pages served as of 13 June, 2000. I believe that Slashdot's traffic is much heavier now, but even using this three-year-old figure, the money saved is impressive.


Welcome to 2005.

Finally, Slashdot Slashdotted, Literally!

Looks like the Slashcode servers aren't as robust and numerous as the Slashdot servers...

Technically, this count as Slashdot Slashotting itself.

The prophecy has been fulfilled.

Re:Finally, Slashdot Slashdotted, Literally!

Add to that the fact that Slashdot is moving to css, Apple using Intel, Apple Shipping 2 Button Mice, Debian 3.1 was released and this year seems to be turning into be the pivotal point for hell to hold the winter olympics.

Re:Finally, Slashdot Slashdotted, Literally!

Here we are at the apocalypse, and we still never got to play Duke Nukem Forever.

Yeah, I went there.

Re:finally... lol

Here's one explanation, from CmdrTaco's Journal [slashdot.org]:

"Pudge has been working a lot on that problem. Specifically we've got scripts to fix HTML in all editor & user contributed content spaces. A lot of this is under way already. Old comments are being automatically fixed in the background. HTML in articles from 1998 is being corrected. Scripts are working very hard. And in some cases, tired editors have been re-reading stories from 1998 to correct HTML errors that boggle the mind. None of this is perfect, so don't be to surprised if you find something wonky. Feel free to mail me URLs if you see it. We've got almost 60,000 articles, 900,000 users, and like 13 million comments. There will be mistakes."

Re:Does the new version...

Yes, it's called Safari [apple.com].

File not found

Hi, could everyone stop clicking on the link for a minute so I can open it, thanks.

Dupe

This has already been done, about two years ago. See http://www.alistapart.com/articles/slashdot2/ [alistapart.com] and particularly http://www.uwplatt.edu/web/webstandards/slashdot.h tml [uwplatt.edu]

Hell froze over

Damn,

It's getting cold down here.

      - Satan

Bug Report

I tried this and it seems to be kicking out quite a few duplicate stories. Is that normal?

huh?

finally, being as /. is such a tech site, it's about time to bring things into this century. Hell, I rework my site constantly, I still can't believe /. went so long with old/outdated/non-validated code. perhaps it could be a quarterly thing to update things in the future.

Let me use Sans fonts

Using the layout as slashcode, it seems that the font is specified to be Serif everywhere... I much prefer to read on-screen stuff with a sans font, which is my default. Please dont specify the font and just use my browser's default... Please remove "font-family: serif;" from the body{}

Thank you,

Tester

Re:Sorry for being a luddite but..

Who cares? Three main groups:

People with disabilities prefer CSS because it allows them to trivally alter layout and visual presentation in a way that works for them. For example, some people have trouble seeing low-contrast presentations; they can insert their own CSS into a CSS-aware page to make any site readable.

The folks who pay for the bandwidth tend to like CSS because it costs less to serve (properly implemented, that is). CSS separates style from content, so the style can be cached while smaller content pages are tranferred on request. This makes a better end-user experience and costs less to provide.

Developers and designers like CSS because it follows the excellent practice of separating view from data. It's easier for a developer to make changes to the underlying code because they worry less about breaking the view; likewise, a designer can make layout tweaks without affecting other areas of code. Clean separation makes fewer bugs.