Saturday, June 19, 2004

we've made a lot of changes since you went insane

In the interests of accessability and to comply with current web standards, I've rewritten much of the code behind this site, and added a few new features. There will be some odd behavior now and again as I tweak the CSS, and some even weirder shit if you are using Internet Explorer (which intentionally defies established web standards), but in the meantime here are the important bits:

Selectable style sheets

If you've got Javascript and CSS enabled, you'll see some links on the left that allow you to choose how you wish to view this page.

The dark style

This is the way I designed the site, though I just made some minor readability changes to it as well (brighter text, cleaner layout). I've been informed that some people find it difficult to read... if the new brighter font colors don't fix that for you, try the other setting.

The light style

New, as seen on TV. White background, darker text, still basically uses the original color scheme, but loses all of that lovely black. This scheme has a higher contrast ratio, so people whose eyes or monitors found the default style to be unreadable should have more luck with this.

The large print

For either of the choices above, you can set the fonts to a larger size for improved readability, or back to the smaller size so you fit more on the screen. Make yourself comfortable.

The fine print

When you change the style of this page, the Javascript attempts to store a cookie that makes your choice persistent. This cookie (named 'WitL', and containing only the name of the style you have chosen) is harmless, and prevents you from having to mess with the styling again on every page. For those who just don't accept cookies regardless (feel the love, people... c o o k i e s), I'm working on adding a checkbox to disable the cookie.



Printer-friendly post pages

On the individual post pages (the 'permalink' at the bottom of posts on the main page), there is now a 'Printer Friendly' option. This changes the style to simple black-on-white, with all of the cruft on the left side hidden as well so you just get the post and comments. This setting is not persistent - no cookie is set, and when you return to the main page it will be styled in the manner you have chosen, unless you haven't chosen in which case you get the default styling.


All of this assumes that you have a modern CSS-aware browser with Javascript and (optionally) cookies enabled.

Power to the people :)
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