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

[afuna]

I like it. Two additional specifics for implementation:

* should be prepended with "tag-", or something
* non-alphanumeric characters should be replaced with an underscore, to make them valid css identifiers. Escaped unicode is also an option, but slightly more complicated, heh :-)

so, "bugzilla: migrated" should have a class "tag-bugzilla__migrated" or even "tag-bugzilla_migrated".

[andrewducker]

This would, presumably, mean that you could hide tags you didn't like?

[cesy]

Yes, though that's also possible with reading filters. But this would allow you to leave the title but hide the body of the entry, for instance.

[turlough]

Sure, why not?

[adalger]

How do you propose to handle the case where an entry has two or more tags with custom css that may conflict with each other? People will have to know a lot more about CSS than they (on average) do now to make this work sensibly.

I'm not against it, just pointing out it may have some learning curve issues.

[zvi]

Whatever is defined last in the CSS takes priority, because that's how CSS works, is my thought.

[ratcreature]

But isn't the weird formatting usually the result of people wanting others to see their content in a certain presentation? If I want for example all my recipes to look like fake paper recipes or something like that, I wouldn't just want a local CSS file to style them that way for me, I would want everyone to see my content in this layout I find cool. Or am I misunderstanding this?

[zvi]

If people are viewing your journal in your style, then they would see your recipe formatting. If they were viewing it in their style or the sitescheme, then they would not see it in your recipe style. This would make your recipes act more like all of the other entries on the site.

[matgb]

Basic rule of being nice online--if you want to force your styling and your preferences onto my reading page, then you might think it's cool, but I find it obnoxious and worthy of unsubscribing.

This is especially true of only partially defined changes--people changing the font colour to a dark blue works fine on their light background, but is unreadable on my necessarily dark background, etc

Auto formatting with CSS is a very nifty trick that I like lots. Hmm, wonder if it could be hacked into a layer anyway.

[msilverstar]

given style=mine and style=light, I think this is probably too much design (and testing) for too little result

[zvi]

Are you working on the assumption that this will be difficult to do or something? There are a lot of classes in the default styles, check out http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/S2_CSS sometime. This idea is right in line with a lot of what's already available in the style system.

[ratcreature]

Well, I am annoyed by hardcoded fonts and such too, because I need somewhat larger (though not huge fonts) to see, so you are preaching to the choir. I think I misunderstood the proposal. I thought it was talking about just implementing the classes for tags to mark them on the site but no styles and then people use CSS on their own computers so that others wouldn't be impacted by the formatting or bothered at all (that's the first thing I think of when I hear "custom css" a local thing that is not for others), but I later realized the proposal likely talks about the CSS you customize for your journal that others do see, unless they do not want to.

[matgb]

Ah, yes, I see--locally customised CSS is something most people will both never do and be completely bemused by, but every journal theme out there these days uses large amount of CSS in it.

I used to do this sort of thing when I was blogging semi-seriously, but had to hand code the 'class=news' and 'class=LOL' code into each post, this would both be a lot easier, be less likely for me to forget and allow me to go back and amend all my old entries easily, which would be nice.

[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.)