livejournal geekery

[egypturnash]

I spent some time playing with my custom LJ style again, nearly a month after first making it. I hope it's at least semi-readable under IE now, if nowhere near as pretty. Barring that, IE should show a link to the same page with a much less beautiful style substituted, and what I hope is a polite suggestion to go use a browser that does not, um, totally suck at standards compliance.

[Addendum: It doesn't, because I did it via conditional comments. Which are very slick and work well, but Livejournal filters out HTML comments somewhere along the line. Damn.]

[Addendum: After realizing it was the comments being stripped, I tried the 'star HTML' bug; IE 5/6 will apply a rule that starts with '* html' while no other browser will. It's not as beautiful but hopefully it will at least make my 'Mozilla, damnit' message work and make the worst of the IE render troubles stop.

Also, I came up with a throwaway feature - I can flick a switch, and people who go to my main journal page will see no entry content, just titles, if they're not logged in to LJ. There're ways around it, of course, and I'm not interested in actually having it set that way - it's just a 'hey! I bet I could do this!" kind of feature.]

On Mozilla strains, it should look something like this - that's Camino, a derivative of Mozilla. Not quite right on Safari, and there're still problems with things like included images without sizes. It's a work in progress. If I can get it to a point where it's perfectly readable in IE, then I'll be happy, even if it's really, really kinda dull..

Comments

[milkpanzer.livejournal.com]

Looks good! The only thing futzed in Opera is the spacing between journal entries but I would have never noticed it had I not looked at the example picture. ^^

[ilthuain.livejournal.com]

Wow, that looks pretty nifty.

[trikotomy.livejournal.com]

:P (http://home.earthlink.net/~wyrmism/images/lj/pegscreen.jpg)

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

I lose!. Damn. Thanks.

I hope the link at the top to a boring style works, at least.

[trikotomy.livejournal.com]

There doesn't appear to be one.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Damn. So much for that elegant method of working around IE dumbness... LJ strips out comments, at least in user-created styles. (I was doing something very elegant and simple, too - if you enclose something in <!--[if IE]> blah blah blah <![endif]-->, other browsers see it as a comment, but IE will parse the stuff inside. (You can also check for specific versions; google around for the details, if you're curious.)

Unfortunately, LJ parses this as just comments, which it throws away. Damn.

Too clever for my own good.