A Happier Style Now

[jducoeur]

There -- I've now beaten my LJ style into some kind of shape. Colors are the kind of mix I like, with dark backgrounds for the surrounding bits but light for the reading bits. I've taken the built-in Tabular Indent template and fixed the obvious bugs. (The colors for the headers in the comments page were oddly hosed due to a couple of typos, and it had structured the HTML such that Mozilla doesn't use the correct foreground colors in the comments. More importantly, I've tweaked the entry boxes so that the Subject always shows up on top, which I strongly prefer; the built-in template shows the header fields in random order.)

Template hacking turns out to be pretty easy: S2 is enough like Perl to be pretty intuitive. (Although the C# geek in me is appalled at the apparent lack of a "continue" statement.) Anyone who knows HTML and Perl reasonably well should be able to pick up S2 quickly.

Hopefully this won't blind anyone any more...

Comments

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, pretty :)

[dkapell.livejournal.com]

Looks fine in links. I'm all about content over style, at least at work.

[johno.livejournal.com]

Very nice. Clean and readable.

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

You could always share your fixes with the LJ staff, if you're so inclined. I'm sure they'd appreciate it. :-)

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Wait, there are branching and looping statements in S2? Just how complex does the style need to be...?

Always assumed it was a markup language, not a complete language. Maybe I'll go poke at it.

[jducoeur]

S2 is, basically, Perl with a few tweaks. Your "layout" is actually a full-blown program -- when you customize it, you're actually setting properties in subclasses. Indeed, your page layout is normally a subclasses composition of a universal base class with deep APIs, the main style, a language layer, and your personal overrides.

It's fully compiled, and I gather that it does some amount of safety-checking at compile time. Frankly, from a cursory look at the language, it appears significantly better than Perl was back when I was doing Perl (admittedly a couple of language revs ago).

It's really quite an elegant and powerful solution, and means that you can do nearly *anything* in terms of layout. You're a bit limited in terms of what information gets passed into each page type, but you can do whatever the heck you like with that information...

[siderea]

Very nice.

I'm perplext. Where does the template live? Did you have to submit it back to the LJ establishement to get it served here?

What documentation should I be reading?

(Right. Just what I need. Another web dev project. Ha ha hah.)

[siderea]

Nevermind. Found the docs.

Well, I like it

[patsmor.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, a whole lot of my clothes are blue with maroon....

[tpau]

while on my machine this is nto painful (it is horrid on learnedax's machine), you do know that a red (of which brown is one of) on a blue is like the world's least readable color combo for computer screens, right? it produces weird 3D effects, and is painful.