HTML clean-up (was post display formatting)

[NemZ]

Am I the only one who is vaguelly annoyed that because posts have a minimum height due to avatars and other sidebar stuff that sometimes when you make a short comment you end up with a lot of empty space in your post? I'm wondering how difficult it would be (or if anyone else thinks it's a worthwhile change in the first place) to set sigs to align to the bottom of a post frame rather than just tagging along after the text regardless of how much or how little of it there is.

In html that should be as easy as adding a float tag, but I don't know how the forum software works this stuff out or how complicated the scripting change would have to be to automate that change.

Then again, it's probably just me.

[Mr. Tines]

The .sig isn't a distinct element in the out of the box layout. A post is a td containing a span; the post content is a div inside that, followed by a break, a line of dashes, another break and the .sig content, in-line, rather than in any sort of container. So if the .sig is just unformatted text, that's just in there unwrapped.

[NemZ]

So it would require putting the sig into a new table row, or more specifically altering the bbcode to tell it to do that. That would automatically create a subtle line break just as it does for the post date/time row and the css would handle the spacing with no need for dashes and breaks, right?

[Ornette]

So it would require putting the sig into a new table row, or more specifically altering the bbcode to tell it to do that. That would automatically create a subtle line break just as it does for the post date/time row and the css would handle the spacing with no need for dashes and breaks, right?

It's more than just putting a row in a table, since rows always align upward and fill downwards, whereas you're looking for a single row to align downward, and fill upwards while all the other rows are the opposite. You're more than welcome to save this page, and play with the HTML yourself, it's something I avoid if at all possible. If you can get it to work then incorporating it into the forum template shouldn't be that difficult.

[Mr. Tines]

Without hacking the HTML, this CSS

[code:1] span.postbody:first-child {
/*border: 1px solid red !important;*/
display: block;
min-height: 200px !important;
}
span.postbody:first-child>div:first-child {
/*border: 1px solid green !important;*/
display: block !important;
min-height: 130px !important;
}[/code:1]

sort of works -- the difference of 70px is the height of my .sig, so it's not a one size fits all. The generated HTML is hideous, as any sort of inspection tool will reveal.

[NemZ]

Wouldn't you just have to add valign="Bottom" to the new row?

...Though that would probably put the cell break right in the middle of the gap rather than above the sig cell unless you specified a fixed height for that cell... which would need to be variable for each user unless we enforced a strict sig size limit, and would still get screwed up with smaller or wider than average screens. Crap.

Yeah, nevermind, not worth the trouble. And from the lack of participation, it probably is just me anyway.

[Mr. Tines]

Starting to look at what the current state of the HTML is, so as to see what could be done to improve matters -- and finding a lot of problems, like

• unencoded ampersands in the breadcrumbs
  
• multiple "--" in comments like "!------ (removed topicrow.LOCK_UNLOCK_JS ----"
  
• missing spaces in some of the jump-to-forum option tags
  
• stray /a tags
  
• id values starting with numerals
  
• copiously misused span (inline section) tags where div (block section) ought be used
  
• inlined Javacript not marked as CDATA

which means it's not in a state where it could even be simply XSLT'd into something sensible.

[Mr. Tines]

I'm starting to make a series of incremental changes to the HTML generation for the forum.

If anyone -- especially with an exotic browser -- sees anything break, please make a report here -- http://forum.evageeks.org/thread/4368/Forum-Wackiness-Alerts-Only/

[riffraff11235]

especially with an exotic browser

Guess that means us, pwhodges!

[pwhodges]

Heh!

(I hope you're joining the protest about the brain-dead Opera v15)

[Sailor Star Dust]

To be honest, I sort of like this "new" look, it's easier on my eyes, at least. But sigs are too spaced out (especially at the bottom) as a result.

[TheFriskyIan]

It's driving me crazy. Maybe it's because I hate change, but I can't see myself getting used to this when I've been with the layout before all my time here. At least it isn't like Youtube where everything goes crazy in the change and I can't get used to it.

[Sailor Star Dust]

No worries. I'm sure Tines or Ornette (or whomever else?) will fix things up soon enough.

[Ornette]

I reset the head of the live repository back to the previous commit, so for now, those changes won't be live anymore.

[TheFriskyIan]

I reset the head of the live repository back to the previous commit, so for now, those changes won't be live anymore.

You're putting me on edge.

[Mr. Tines]

The problem is that the forum markup is relying rather more than I had expected on not being correctly rendered according to the HTML standard; I'm currently working to fix up the most obvious places -- mostly the bits where the traditional old 1x1 spacer .gif images are being used in table cells -- before pushing another change. And that one should be almost invisible unless you look at the page source.

[Mr. Tines]

The changes have now reached a first milestone, which is that

• the (user, mod) pages are rendered in standards mode rather than quirks mode (I see no real need to touch the admin pages -- they just have to work)
  
  The markup is still fairly crufty -- validating the forum top page at the W3C (http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fforum.evageeks.org%2Findex.php&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0) reports
  
  

  Result: 251 Errors, 39 warning(s)

  
  
  but the vast majority of these are saying "it's 2013, so move your table styling into your style sheet", so addressing them shouldn't cause the sort of disruption we've seen in the last few days.
  
• things look and work pretty much as they did before, especially on the topic view pages (you may need to flush your browser cache to pick up the script changes needed to make the double-click in-place edit work in standards mode). The doubleclick editing should now hopefully not corrupt ampersands -- there was a missing semicolon in the hand-rolled escaping code -- though non-ASCII characters will still break
  
• the topic view pages now render posts with semantic markup -- each post body (in the message column) is a section, containing an article for the post content and an aside for the .sig (containing the blank line and the line of underscores as well as your customized text)
  
  This will affect any Greasemonkey userscripts or Stylish userstyles that you may be using -- I know it's broken my YouTube embedding userscript, and I shall have to test the "ignore user" userscript; however, it should make it simpler now to write these things since you can now identify post material more easily.

[Nuclear Lunchbox]

Everything looks fine here, except for the user pages of our forum members. Everything is strangely spaced out. Rest of the stuff here is fine.

EDIT: The same thing is happening whenever I preview one of my posts.

[TheFriskyIan]

I already forgot if the front page layout was always like this or not. I didn't know I would adapt so quickly to change on here. Everything else looks fine.

[NemZ]

I've been occationally getting the following error message. Did you change something again?

[code:1]Debug mode
Line : 132
File : smtp.php[/code:1]