There are not many websites that can comfortably be loaded with 50kbps bandwidth, but this one can. I delved into some more information about resource handling for low-end devices, and chances are I might ditch CSS altogether. Tables too. Code blocks too, actually. I do believe in text supremacy, so getting rid of any graphical things seems like a good idea. I’m working on enhancing the scripts I use, so changes are coming… as soon as I defeat my sudden narcolepsy.
On other news, my patch was approved.
2021-11-15 09:40
Does anyone remember El Tigre? I kind of do. Nice character designs, the tomboyish girl side-kick, and the family issues in dad being a superhero and dad’s dad being a supervillain were really nice touches.
But as much as I would like to lend those series a bit of my time, I know that it won’t be worth it. Life’s too short for choosing suboptimal entertainment.
2021-11-12 06:57
I just removed the CSS entry for \<blockquote>. It takes a significant portion of the .css file and it is only used in one place. And I’m not really the person who quotes others often. Not in the chunks worth a quote block, at least.
I also simplified tables significantly. They might look a bit worse now, but they still convey the same information… and now they are compatible with links. Who would have known \<table> has an attribute border.
…
And then I went for a full-on CSS “refactoring” a.k.a. removal ov everything that is not too important to keep the site readable (and have dark themed color palette, I don’t want my eyes to burn off!). As a result, CSS is now so small there is no sense in keep it in an external file (An HTTP request would take more bandwith!). Which means I’m putting it into the page generating script now.
MD4WEB.MD will now host the updated version of the script.
2021-11-11 06:31
So, several days ago I found out that the page I really liked did not render right in Links browser. To put it short, that website was written in poor HTML and all other browsers somehow accepted it. But not Links. I’ve spent several hours tracking the bug down, learning about how Links creates tables, and coming up with a patch that would make the website load correctly. Now I’m the best programmer who has ever lived. I’m adding the patch here (ed script because I don’t want to include their code) so you can all benefit from my immeasureable wisdom. I’ve sent a mail to browser devs but I kind of doubt they consider it worth caring for.
# html_tbl.c
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< int norow = 1;
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< if (t_namelen == 3 && !casecmp(t_name, cast_uchar "/TR", 3)) norow = 1;
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< norow = 0;
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< if (norow && x) ++y, x = 0, norow = 0;
The original code can be downloaded here; credits to Twibright Labs, but no credits to Stallman who thinks GPL is better than public domain.
2021-11-11 05:36
So, regarding CSS and thought feeds in particular. I made a decision to remove all div blocks from the thoughts feed to avoid styling. Creating custom divs is an Extended Markdown feature (I believe) and it exploits usage of quotation syntax. Not only is it a sort of workaround hack, its only reasonable usage is to enable CSS styling for specific blocks of text. Which I don’t want to be enabled.
CSS was completed in 1996 and it took several more years to get it polished and adopted widely. Therefore, it is not exactly something from the dawn of Internet. More importantly, text browsers usually don’t support CSS at all.
This is why I decided to get rid of div blocks on my website, starting with web feeds. CSS will be minimised for ease of reading with browser (and for distinct color palette), but not for anything else.
The only drawback is lack of padding for thought entries. But principles first.
2021-11-08 18:53