Is the redesign going to be similar across all the subsites?

February 16, 2005 12:46 PM

The HTML markup of Metafilter proper ("the blue") differs from the markup of Metatalk and Ask Metafilter. Given the upcoming changes to Metafilter's look, can we expect similarity in markup across the site, or should we explicitly not rely on undocumented features of Metafilter? [mi]
posted by orthogonality to Feature Requests at 12:46 PM (8 comments total)

Specifically, in Metatalk and AskMetaFilter, each individual comment is inside a <div> element, which makes parsing it out pretty easy.

Metafilter, on the other hand, puts all comments in a single <div>; to find the beginning of a particular comment, it's necessary to walk backward looking for an anchor tag, and to find the end, walk forward to find the span element containing the author's name.

This also makes it difficult for Mozilla browsers to identify individual comments, as can be seen by the different behavior of extensions like NukeAnything on Metafilter as compared to Metatalk.

Even the markup in MetaTalk and Ask could be slightly cleaner: currently the individual comment div has as its children the comment text (which can be arbitrarily many HTML elements) followed by the span element, which contains the author data. The span element is always the div's last child, but processing would be even easier if the comment text were enclosed in another div, thus making the comment div always have exactly two children.

Of course, the primary concern is that Metafilter work and that Mathowie not be unnecessarily burdened, or constrained to keep to a form a markup the site's outgrown because third parties have come to rely on it.

But a consistent markup -- if it doesn't otherwise detract from the site -- makes making third party tools easier.
posted by orthogonality at 1:02 PM on February 16, 2005

Yes, the rewrite of mefi designs into HTML have an eye towards going xhtml 1.0 standardized as much as possible. Part of that is making each post its own div mostly for screen-scrapers that aren't using the RSS file instead.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:12 PM on February 16, 2005

We believe and trust in Him
posted by NinjaPirate at 1:44 PM on February 16, 2005

It's still better than Slashdot.
posted by smackfu at 1:49 PM on February 16, 2005

Metafilter: it's still better than Slashdot
posted by cosmonik at 2:01 PM on February 16, 2005

But will there be a <pony> tag in the new metafilter?
posted by Captain_Tenille at 7:08 PM on February 16, 2005

Test post-- Ok, so if we see two consecutive BRs, we'll retain them. But the nesting of italics and quotes is working correctly, and apostrophes are being correctly distinguished from quotes.

And all other markup, like links and images, is preserved.

Italic Not italic emphasis not emphasis.

y2karl didn't say, "kyrademon won't say, 'Quonsar can't say "Steve shouldn't say 'things' about jessaymin saying 'recursive sentences are ugly' to Matthowie" to Matthowie' to Matthowie".
posted by orthogonality at 12:07 AM on February 17, 2005

orthogonality writes "Test post-- Ok, so if we see two consecutive BRs, we'll retain them.
But the nesting of italics and quotes is working correctly, and
apostrophes are being correctly distinguished from quotes.

And all other markup, like links and images, is preserved.

Italic Not italic emphasis not emphasis.

y2karl didn't say, 'kyrademon won't say, "Quonsar can't say 'Steve shouldn't say "things" about jessaymin saying "recursive sentences are ugly" to Matthowie' to Matthowie" to Matthowie'."
posted by orthogonality at 12:08 AM on February 17, 2005