Make the tags of an entry be classes on the entry

[zvi]

Title:
Make the tags of an entry be classes on the entry

Area:
styles, entries

Summary:
Apply the tags assigned to an entry as classes to the entry as well. This will allow a user to put custom CSS to style all of their entries tagged a certain way (e.g. recipe, story, art) the same.

Description:
I have sometimes come across people who like to post some subset of their entries, usually their fanfiction, in ways that I find not very readable, mostly to do with spacing, sometimes they feel the need to set the story font, or they want colors in the heading or something.

If the entries of that type all had a class applied to them, the person could use custom CSS to style the entry as they liked when they were looking at it or when someone was looking at it in its original style, but when I switched to my style, all of their styling would go away, as is not now the case when I apply Firefox's "No style" function to a page where styling has been directly applied.

The main difficulty would be advertising that the feature exists so that people could take advantage of it. Also, it would add to the length of journal pages, making them longer to download than they are now.

Poll #1503 Make the tags of an entry be classes on the entry

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 36

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
23 (63.9%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
1 (2.8%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
3 (8.3%)

(I have no opinion)
8 (22.2%)

(Other: please comment)
1 (2.8%)

Comments

[triadruid]

I like it in theory, but I really dislike the intersection of alphabetized tags and ordered CSS.

[zvi]

??? I don't know what you mean by that.

[triadruid]

There looks to be a decided amount of instability in how implementing this might work. If one handcodes the CSS and never touches it any other way, sure you might be able to make the fiddliness work. But if anything ever re-organizes your CSS file, or you utilize !important one too many times, or forget whether your 'recipe' tag or your 'needs commentary' tag has primacy... it could all come sideways.

And while that's bad enough to do to your own personal view of a post, changing everybody's view makes it catastrophically unstable.

[zvi]

I don't see how it's any more disastrous than someone's ability to make their whole journal light gray background with a white text in a four point fantasy font, which they can currently do through the wizard. And in this case, because the disastrous CSS would be attached to the entry writer's style instead of their entry, anyone viewing the entry would just have to switch to the viewer's own style or the light style or the sitescheme to evade the disaster.

The CSS file which would affect an entry writer's tags would be the CSS they write in the wizard, or a link to a CSS file they host elsewhere. The CSS in their user layer is treated as a text string. AFAIK, the system doesn't touch it or reorder it, just reprints it. So the power and responsibility of using this new tag wisely would be up to the individual, as we want as many style decisions as possible to be.

(the reordering of the user layer that has been put into bugzilla affects the order of style variables. For the purposes of s2, custom CSS is a single text string variable. Any ordering should not affect it.)