Background color and info in RSS ponies

August 17, 2005 6:21 AM

QuickTwoPonyRequest: [1] Can a background color for alternating comment s be used to aid readability? [2] Can tags, category and poster information be added to the two RSS feeds?
posted by Rothko to Feature Requests at 6:21 AM (35 comments total)

That should have read "alternating comment <div> elements".
posted by Rothko at 6:23 AM on August 17, 2005

I would not support [1] (er, if I understand it), but I would support alternate stylesheets, sure 'nuff.

Including *cough* another request for plainstyle settings to be extended to Metatalk and Ask Metafilter.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:27 AM on August 17, 2005

I don't like [1] either. Readability's just fine as is.
posted by languagehat at 7:00 AM on August 17, 2005

This comment is a call to suppress idea 1 forever.
posted by majick at 7:01 AM on August 17, 2005

Well, I'm glad that's settled.
posted by Rothko at 7:09 AM on August 17, 2005

Anyone who supports [1] is a communist or a paedophile.
posted by Kwantsar at 7:52 AM on August 17, 2005

Show me a RSS file that passes the validator that displays both category information and tags. Tags weren't around when RSS 2.0 was written, and I haven't figured out the consensus on that, as flickr makes up an extension and delicious uses RSS 1.0.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:07 AM on August 17, 2005

I like #1, providing the color shift is subtle and close to the original background color.

In Soviet Russia there are no little girls.
posted by cedar at 8:09 AM on August 17, 2005

Also, can't you futz with the layout of this site all you want using greasemonkey?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 8:43 AM on August 17, 2005

Show me a RSS file that passes the validator that displays both category information and tags.

How about something like the following, using <category> for categories and a <comments> tag to enclose tags?

The comments can be parsed from the application grabbing the feed, for example, but would still be perfectly readable without any extra parsing.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Ask MetaFilter</title>
    <link>http://ask.metafilter.com/</link>
    <description>The past 25 questions posed at Ask MetaFilter</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <pubDate>Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:00:00 EST</pubDate>
    <lastBuildDate>Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:00:00 EST</lastBuildDate>
    <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
    <generator>TextWrangler</generator>
    <managingEditor>mathowie(at)gmail.com</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>mathowie(at)gmail.com</webMaster>
    <item>
      <title>Where are my car keys?</title>
      <link>http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/007</link>
      <description>I lost my car keys; can you help me find them? I know they're around here someplace.</description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:00:00 EST</pubDate>
      <guid>http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/007</guid>
      <category>food & drink</category>
      <comments>Keys CarKeys Amnesia ChatFilter</comments>
    </item>
...
  </channel>
</rss>

This code follows the RSS 2 specification as explained here.
posted by Rothko at 8:48 AM on August 17, 2005

Also, can't you futz with the layout of this site all you want using greasemonkey?

I've given up on Firefox for the time being. Too slow and buggy, at least on OS X. I know that's not your problem, just saying that not everyone uses the same browser.
posted by Rothko at 8:50 AM on August 17, 2005

Anyone who supports [1] is a communist or a paedophile.

What if we're both? What if were both and we still don't like #1?
posted by Pollomacho at 9:05 AM on August 17, 2005

Pollomacho: "Anyone who supports [1] is a communist or a paedophile.

What if we're both? What if were both and we still don't like #1?"

Clearly it was meant as a sufficient criteria, not a necessary one. All that pot-smoking much be affecting your reading comprehension, commie.
posted by Plutor at 9:24 AM on August 17, 2005

Oh, don't be so hard on the poor commie. I see no problem with [1] as an opt-in per-user option if the implementation of such does not seriously distract Glorious Leader from implementing the things that I actually care about.
posted by cortex at 9:34 AM on August 17, 2005

I like #1, providing the color shift is subtle and close to the original background color.

Alright! Someone on this wonderful site agrees with me! /highfives
posted by Rothko at 9:35 AM on August 17, 2005

Including *cough* another request for plainstyle settings to be extended to Metatalk and Ask Metafilter.

seconded. or *cough* support someone writing a plainstyle for greasemonkey (maybe today's the day I do it myself!*)

*not really
posted by fishfucker at 9:37 AM on August 17, 2005

comments for tags? Naw, I was thinking more along the lines of a community agreed upon method for displaying tags, because I haven't found it yet.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:40 AM on August 17, 2005

Naw, I was thinking more along the lines of a community agreed upon method for displaying tags, because I haven't found it yet.

Few sites use tags. How about the <media:category> tag in this community-agreed-upon namespace, which could be applied as easily to categories as to tags?
posted by Rothko at 9:59 AM on August 17, 2005

I also agree with #1. Here's how it could work:

1. Add a CSS signature by adding id="metafilter" to the body tag.
2. Add class="odd"/class="even" to the DIVs
3. Users use user stylesheets to alternate the colors if they want, like so: body#metafilter .odd {background:pink;} body#metafilter .even {background:blue;}

posted by kirkaracha at 10:02 AM on August 17, 2005

I like #1.

Oh, and only one class is necessary, class="alt". It would be applied to every second <div>

So, you'd have:

<div class="comments">…<div>
<div class="alt comments">…<div>
<div class="comments">…<div>
<div class="alt comments">…<div>

On another note, I'd like to see proper id attributes on the comments <div>s, rather than the empty anchor elements.
posted by ijoshua at 10:59 AM on August 17, 2005

kirkaracha's idea sounds great.

The modifications to the templates shouldn't be too difficult and this way those of us (seemingly a minority) who care would be able to get the look we want without the changes bothering anyone else.
posted by cedar at 11:08 AM on August 17, 2005

How about global location replacing zip codes on the user pages?

A man can dream, can't he?
posted by languagehat at 11:41 AM on August 17, 2005

I heard somewhere that mathowie will be working on that in his spare time.
posted by timeistight at 1:42 PM on August 17, 2005

I think we should have adverts for hostess twinkies on the site.
posted by sgt.serenity at 2:54 PM on August 17, 2005

How about global location replacing zip codes on the user pages?

You're not the only one dreaming. Seconded.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 2:57 PM on August 17, 2005

Also, what is this - the pony express?
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 2:58 PM on August 17, 2005

timeistight did some great work to make this happen, and I revisited the code recently to clean it up for the Google maps hack and it still worked. I can convert from zips to lat/lon fairly quickly when I get some time to do that.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 3:14 PM on August 17, 2005

Also, can't you futz with the layout of this site all you want using greasemonkey?

I do not use Firefox.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:34 PM on August 17, 2005

I do not use Firefox.

You sir, are a communist.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 7:59 PM on August 17, 2005

And not a paedophile?
posted by nicwolff at 8:14 PM on August 17, 2005

You sir, are a communist.

Well, I did used to go out with a girl who distributed Marxist Weekly on the streets of Edinburgh, many years ago. But not because she was a commie, because she was beeeyoootiful.

And not a paedophile?

She was over 18.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:22 PM on August 17, 2005

(Disclosure : I use Maxthon, the IE wrapper, and a plugin called MyStyle, which I've written a stylesheet for to do basically the same thing -- apply a plain style and remove [img]s -- but I'm lazy, and clicking that button to apply the style everytime I load a page is just soooo taxing....)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:39 PM on August 17, 2005

Rothko: assuming you're using Safari, I suspect Machete, which is a feature of Pith Helmet, might be able to sort out alternate comment highlighting for you. (Not tinkered with it myself, but Machete looks to be pretty close to Greasemonkey for Safari)
posted by jack_mo at 5:22 AM on August 18, 2005

Matt, the RSS 3 specification was announced today, as a superset of RSS 2.

In particular, you might want to take a look at the subfields of the <field> element, which would let you specify both category and tag type information in a community-approved way.
posted by Rothko at 12:39 PM on August 18, 2005

RSS 3 is the pet project fork of just one douchbag, rather than the existing 5 major implementations of RSS and Atom, which are maintained by hundreds of people.

I too like #1. that woulld be awesome. Every other comment in a slightly lighter shade of blue/green/gray. Easy to do with CSS. if the <div> structure supports it.

I want the Poster to be named in the feed way more than the tags, though tags/categories would be nice.

Here's the trick to implementing this in the feed:
Don't do anything special. Just use normal links.

You don't need any fancy RSS extensions at all. Just incorporate normal links to the poster's user page at the head or tail of each post, and normal links to the URIs for tags and categories at the end of the body of the post. It's not that hard.

If you wanted to do something extra special you could list how many comments are in the thread, but only if you haven't already implemented a way for the newsreader to only download the feed if it's changed.
posted by blasdelf at 6:08 PM on August 26, 2005