Time to clean up the HTML code?
By boxed , Section Code [] Posted on Fri Sep 17, 2004 at 12:00:00 PM PST
The scoop engine is very powerful and flexible but it still uses antique non-valid HTML without CSS which increases the bandwidth costs of the server unneccessarily while making it harder to make skins and making it impossible to use the site from certain devices with small screens.

I propose to clean up the HTML code to XHTML (version 1 transitional, let's not be fanatic here) and CSS. This task may seem daunting at first but there are several steps to this, one of which can be automated easily. Each step has concrete gains for the scoop engine. Convert all HTML/XHTML tags to lowercase. <FOO> is invalid XHTML, it should be <foo>. There is already a lot of HTML in scoop that is lowercase, and mixing the two standards is pretty ugly. In any case, this proccess can be fully automated. Move all background color, text color and link color directives to CSS. When this is implemented one can already make a simple skin system where the users can either write their own CSS or choose from a set of them. Remove all font tags in favor of CSS. Again, the skinning possibilities here are vastly expanded, and usability from small devices is increased. Change menus to use styled unordered lists. This has the advantage of making the entire line clickable and not only the link itself. There are some great examples of this. This should also remove a lot of unneccessary CSS class declarations. Remove the use of tables. This will make Scoop directly usable from devices with very small screens, like smart phones and PDAs.

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Clean up the code? · yes 83% · no 0% · I don't see the point 16% · I don't care 0% Votes: 6 Results | Other Polls

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· Scoop · There are some great examples of this · More on Feature Requests · Also by boxed

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