[haiku-web] Re: Recent haiku-os.org CSS code tag changes and syntax highlighting

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:11 AM, Jorge G. Mare<koki@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> I agree had this been a critical problem. But I doubt this was the case
> Ryan did mention generalities, but I still need to see what specifically
> was screwed up where by the CSS changes that were made.

It probably wasn't critical, but the CSS did change in a way that was
inconsistent with how it was before. The code tag was set to "display:
block" when normally it is "display: inline" (and AFAIK it has always
been inline on the site until that point.) So in my article there was
code that had once been inline in a sentence but was now in a block,
which looked strange and made it hard to read.

Now I didn't know this change was part of the CSS from the User Guide,
since as has been pointed out no usage of the code tag was on the test
page (just a pre, which looked as it should.) We still haven't heard
from Humdinger, but my general feeling is that code tags should not
just be displayed block. But if there is another way to deal with
inline code in the CSS (a span with a certain class or whatever), that
is fine, since it does remove the need for a lot of pre tags for
block-displayed code.

> Regardless of whether the change was warranted or not, I think the least
> that one can expect is a brief note saying that a change has been made
> (you guys do it all the time when changing other people's commits). Good
> manners aside, those who maintain the site or are working on trying to
> improve it will also find it difficult to do a good job if people can go
> and make changes without telling anyone.

In the same way I would have appreciated a note that my article was
being changed. I only found out when Urias mentioned it to me. Why
Drupal did not tell me it was edited is something I wonder about too.

> In our website, the only rule is that there is no rule; that's the
> reality. Everyone formats their code quite arbitrarily, so it is hard to
> make everyones article look as they should.

We could definitely define some standards, just as we do with our
coding guidelines.

> In fact, the reason this
> issue came up was because I was asked (on IRC) to fix Ryan's article
> formatting, which contained (as Ryan himself mentioned) HTML tags that
> rendered the code very hard to read.

Yeah I am definitely up for never using VIM again to syntax highlight
code for use on the web. What an ugly mess, and a pain to modify.

> One way we are thinking about addressing this problem is by adopting
> some form of automated highlighting, so that the code can simply be copy
> and pasted. I am already experimenting with this in the Drupal 6 version
> of the website we are working on, and it seems to be working OK (btw, it
> uses the <code> tags for both inline and blocks of code). By the time we
> upgrade the site, we will also (hopefully) have documented simple
> guidelines for formatting content in general, which should help
> ameliorate the situation.

This will definitely help.

-- 
Regards,
Ryan
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