Ideas for ILX

Oh that's OK... Cheers.

The black text on the Site New Answers page is unfixable with CSS because of this:

<li><a style='color: #000000'

There's an inline style somewhere, and that'll always trump.

And yes, keith, if I haven't mentioned it in a while... you rule. :)

Yeah, the style is how it does the colouring... The bug is that 'restore defaults' should make it not put the style in at all, not make it set them all to black.

(is this how keith spends his holiday?)

lol - going to Glasgow shortly to see various ILXors and Dr. C.

welcome to site new answers, kenan, you will be able to keep up with site new nonsense better now.

Well, not too much. The stylesheet I use is almost unreadable on that page. I'm kind of glad I didn't know that before, because there's nothing I can do about it. The links are black, black forever. Black like death.

I'll fix that...

And this is the most used page? I could crawl into a hole right now. I feel like I've been walking around with a booger hanging out of my nose for the last 3 years.

Well, we just didn't want to embarrass you by saying anything.

Huh, New Questions. Interesting. I assumed that this would be a list of unanswered questions. Maybe that's how it used to be?

Keith, you are awesome.

Yeah I think buried is fine - or maybe with a simple default configuration that people can customise, but cutting them altogether likely isn't going to work.

― Keith, Tuesday, August 4, 2009 11:58 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I've kind of lost track of what specific menu bar features are getting added here, but philosophically I disagree with this. Getting the UI right is hard, and people are always going to wail and gnash when you take away their pet feature, but my experience of developing for end users is that cutting features that are either little-used, have better alternatives, or are just silly (alphabetical list of threads?!) will make your life easier in the long run, as well as making the site easier to use.

I've got a couple of different menubar mockups kicking about somewhere, will see if they're still relevant.

Keith: could sna colouring use named colours rather than values? That'd let stylesheets define them to fit in.

In Waverley. No sign of Janet Street Porter. Up to anything this afternoon? Will be in Glasgow in 45.

OK, this is maybe a dumb question, but when you're in Site New Answers, is it possible for threads you've clicked on to appear in a different color, just as it is if you were viewing a board on its own? I'm also not sure that the blue used in thread titles on blueski.css is an option on Site New Answers, but I guess I can live with that. (Basically, I want Site New Answers to visually render exactly like blueski.css.)

This works if you stop hiding sub-boards (at least with old.css).

unreg users on IRE

Jaymc, this is the thing that was so disturbing me upthread. There's an errant bit of code that makes all links on the Site New Answers page black, clicked or not clicked, style or no style, no matter what. And only on that page.

Ok, not all links -- all thread title links. Which is kind of even weirder, because every other link on the page is more prominent than the one you want to click.

Kenan, it's not as simple as that. It doesn't style them at all if you've never messed with the customisation.

Jay, yes I'll have a think, but will take a bit of work as I'll need to figure out the maths for hsb colours (to make visited links darker than whatever colour you've chosen or something like that) and so on but I thinking could do it.

Cool, thanks. That's one of the reasons I don't use Site New Answers very often.

You have more than one reason!? :)

yes, that's also my main reason (the other being that a lot of boards confuse me). In any case, thanks a lot for doing this!

hsb? u mean rgb? i'd subtract the same amount - percentage wise - about 25%? from each val. of course you'd have to split the string into the three components.

Well, only a couple of other reasons. One is that if you're following more than a few boards, older threads get bumped off the page more quickly. Another might just be a personal psychological thing -- like it just feels more orderly to look at the boards separately. I feel like I can keep track of things better. But I still use SNA from time to time, mostly to see if I've missed things on the smaller boards I don't check quite as often as ILE/ILM.

No I meant hsb - I think I am right... Doing it in rgb doesn't quite work e.g you can't make red (255-0-0) darker by any easy multiplication of the rgb numbers I think, but you can convert to hsb, reduce the 'b' and then put it back to rgb.

Sorry meant lighter not darker. Not easy this on an iPhone.

Ah okay Jay. Makes sense.

If the colors are CSS instead of hardcoded, you get the darkening for free -- just make them <A class="greenlink" or the like, and in the stylesheet specify a:link to be whatever actual color value you want. If there's no a:visited style, you'll get the browser default, but if you want to make it a darker green or w/e, then the stylesheet can do that.

I can't for the life of me think how a stylesheet could work here but I guess I'll be seeing you shortly so I suppose we can talk it over!

ok, yup, lighter is harder. how would you convert to hsb tho? (btw i think of it as hsv, hence my confusion).

I know that it's not need-to-know for me at this point, but I don't understand what's unavoidable about having an inline style that colors the links on just that one page. But there's a lot I don't know here, and I can happily file this under "known unknowns."

If I could type faster on this thing I would explain my logic! When I'm back at my desk!

it's 'cause of users picking their own colours for site new answers, ain't it? that kind of overrides and sits outside any stylesheet coding.

unless you want to hack every stylesheet with a class for every possible colour (and visited, etc, variations thereon).

users can pick their own colors for... what? They can?

That's it. I think Stet's point is that you could abstract it e.g. the class is 'death' which is defined to be black and you could also hardwire a visited class but this would all seem impractical to me... Black doesn't mean death to Chinese people, for example. My finger hurts.

it does to me

sure, blame it on the chinese

Lol kenan.

Ledge rgb to hsv is a little complicated. Google it. There's an algorithm on wikipedia I think.

So you can pick your own colors for links on the new answers page (which remains future news to me, I don't see any such option), AND you can pick your own stylesheet, which conflicts with the colors the users may have picked... goddamn, man. You're going to give yourself a brain hemorrhage over this. Just DO NOT DO one of those things. Why would you need to do both?

It's been that way for about two years! Click on the site new answers heading.

colour picker is linked from prefs page.

it's 'cause of users picking their own colours for site new answers, ain't it? that kind of overrides and sits outside any stylesheet coding.

Well, even if you don't pick your own colors for Site New Answers, you're still stuck with the default color (black). Basically, as it stands, you can't use SNA without overriding stylesheet colors for thread titles.

Yes you can. The problem arises when you start hiding sub-boards, or at least this is the way old.css behaves; I can't speak for the other stylesheets.

> how would you convert to hsb tho?

java's Color class has a method. (the actual maths is a fiddle, usually a case statement which splits it up into 60 degree segments and treats them differently. http://actionsnippet.com/?p=797 )

Yes you can. The problem arises when you start hiding sub-boards, or at least this is the way old.css behaves; I can't speak for the other stylesheets.

Maybe I don't understand what you're talking about. I just changed my stylesheet to "old.css," I selected show "all" boards in the Site New Answers settings, and I set the color for all of the boards to be the default, black. Site New Answers still shows thread titles as black, rather than the blue/purple of old.css.

Does it do this if you click the "Restore Defaults" button as opposed to manually setting the values?

A-ha! No, it doesn't. I forgot about "Restore Defaults." Yeah, that works fine then, even with blueski.css. So the problem only develops if you set preferences for Site New Answers.