CmdrTaco's Journal: CSS on Slashdot

One of the most common requests I get today is to bring Slashdot up to date with modern web technologies like CSS & XHTML. People ask this question in a variety of ways ranging from the accusatory and conspiratorial to the flat out mean. Some fairly elaborate conspiracies have been suggested to me, usually involving me taking money from someone or another in exchanging for not updating Slashdot's core HTML. And often people just say we're lazy. And thats true, but only to a point.

The truth is that bringing Slashdot into the modern era of web design would please me beyond measure. It is unfortunately, non-trivial to do this. We already have a highly templated system under the hood here, so for many parts of our code maintenance, it isn't that necessary. But at the end of the day, smaller pages that render compatibly over many platforms trumps anything else.

A few projects have tried over the years to CSSify Slashdot, but they rarely go the distance. They take the first steps... like showing Slashdot's Index in CSS. Of course that can be done. And in fact, it's relatively easy. I took a crack at it myself last summer and in a few hours had duplicated the index without any real problem.

But thats just the first step. Slashdot has dozens of pages with unique formatting. Some of these are used by many users, like, oh, for example this journal that you're looking at. It won't require a lot of custom CSS to make it work, but it'll take some. Also there's the difference between logged in users and anonymous cowards. There are a number of user interface differences. The real kicker is the administrative functionality. Most users don't understand the depth of functionality hidden under the hood of Slashdot for managing not just submissions and story editing, but countless pages for countless bits of functionality throughout the site.

Of course, a lot of that admin specific functionaltiy can be ignored for a later date, and no doubt thats exactly what we'll do..

When the core xhtml is done, we also will need to do CSS style templates for each of the subsections on Slashdot, as well as each of the Slash based sites at OSTG that might also wish to partake in the CSS goodness.

Fortunately for us, Wes, OSTGs super HTML pimp is going to take a crack at actually making a proper CSS/xHTML layout for Slashdot. From there, we can put static pages up to make sure that it is compatibile with the various browsers out there. Then we can move on to actually making Slashdot use that new code...

Thats all underway now. I'd love to hear feedback, but I'd rather someone jsut handed us feature complete templates... not just "The First Steps". I bet a dozen people have taken the first steps. Look at my proof of concept! See it can be done! Don't get me wrong- thats swell.. but showing someone that you can walk is a lot different then telling them 'Great, now walk to philly and get me a cheesesteak'