[theforum] the new CSS... now, please?

ekm at seastorm.com ekm at seastorm.com
Sun Nov 23 01:58:18 CST 2008


> Hi Erika,
> in fact there *are* styles applied to
> H4s.

um, yeah.  Maybe it would help if I didn't put the slash BEFORE the first
h4.  fixed that.

OTOH... it now appears that h4's render exactly the same as h2's.  And
h5's.  And for some reason, the h3 is light grey, while the others are
black.

see:
http://www.evolt.org/guide_code2

> design in CSS/HTML/Drupal I can tell you that there was a fair amount
> of thought that was put into rendering the design faithfully, and it's
> not as random and unstyled as it might seem.

??? whatever purpose it had back in 2005, for example to make an h3 light
grey, and every other headline black and the same size (on IE7 which is
the only browser I currently have access to).... it can't hurt to try
something different today.

> If you remember from Elfur's post, some of
> the problem is actually in the coding of the original articles - not
> in the styles at all.

That was a different issue: line-height applied to paragraphs, and article
excerpts with varying coding.  I went in and fixed all excerpts on the
front page to be consistent (all are wrapped in <p> tags now) so that that
line hight would stop being wonky.

> There was a suggestion that we use Martin's version of the Mollio text
> styles. Has anyone actually seen what that does to the current design?
> Which styles are being used? Please tell me we aren't going to end up
> with bright red headlines!

Mollio styles are very vanilla, black headlines IIRC which are visually
heirarchical, which would be better than what we have.  There are no
bright red headlines on those styles.  Nothing besides black IIRC. 
Whoever applies new styles should of course make sure they have (or leave
& rename, whatever our policy is) a back up of our current style sheet. 
Then if some *horrible* thing should happen, it will be no big deal.

But I checked the styles (whatever link that Martin had posted) and truly
they are plain vanilla.

> I'm fairly sure a cut and paste job from
> Mollio is going to cause problems with the rest of the design.

We are web professionals.

> Erika, perhaps you could outline exactly what you think needs to be
> changed - something more concrete then SUCKAGE or that you hate it.

I've been for weeks... some of it is in these past couple emails.  Anyway,
check the code guide, look at how things render - lists - headers -  and
*you* tell me. :)

CSS typography is not, need not, should not be complex, or difficult to
tweak.  If one keeps a backup of one's original styles, why shouldn't a
person just go for it?

> What would you change the styles of the headlines to? What would you
> change the styles of the paragraphs, lists etc to so that the
> typography didn't suck and why would changing it that way make it not
> suck?

I think what Martin proposed is better than what we have now, and that we
should switch out, the way he pointed out, and then if that does something
bad, retract if necessary, and discuss.

Trust me, if t.e.o were useful in this case, I'd have already written a
new type/color stylesheet. But why do all that work (while doing a bunch
of other work) when there might be something already done that we could
try -- for now -- until new front end is done.

> a discussion about how/what the styles should be changed to - I just
> think there should be more concrete discussion about it than I hate
> it, it sucks before someone goes in and messes about with it all.

um.  does anyone else have an opinion?

I'm particularly bothered by H1-H6 which do not appear to have any
relationship to their heirarchy.  Lists also offer no information when
marked up POSH.

There is other stuff I just consider "sucky" such as italicizing
everything between <q> tags, too much space around header tags, and the
default font-size which I find difficult to read... but, whatever.  Some
of it is just annoying, but other stuff seems almost ridiculous.

Erika




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