Code Tour, May 26-June 9 2011

[aedifica]

We have a lovely code tour for your perusal this evening, with twelve marvelous bugs. Some of these are already live and some aren't yet:

Bug 2704: English-strip /poll
Category: English-Stripping
Patch by: someone who didn't close the bug
Description: There was some specifically English-language text in a place that didn't need it. Why remove it? Two reasons: So that if someone wants to translate Dreamwidth to another language, there's less English stuff hard-coded into the site for them to hunt down and change; and so that if Dreamwidth ever wants to change the wording, it will be easier for someone to change without having to have a dev come along and re-write the code. (I don't know who fixed it; metawidget came along to take a look at the bug and discovered it was already fixed.)

Bug 3699: dw_suggestions profile still refers to http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/suggest.bml
Category: Frontend
Patch by: Bugzilla doesn't say, but presumably denise
Description: Did you ever notice your "Post an Entry" page's URL used to end in .bml, and now it doesn't have to anymore? Similarly, the dw_suggestions profile page still had a link to the .bml version of the Suggestions form's URL. Now it doesn't.

Bug 809: popup overlaps links on create widget
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: metawidget
Description: For some browser/operating system combinations, the "Create Account" screen's tooltips used to cover up the links to the TOS and/or Privacy Policy, which is bad because you should at least pretend to read them before you agree to the terms--and it's hard to do that if something is in the way of your clicking on the link.

Bug 3688: Basic Boxes: 7 themes
Category: Style System
Patch by: sarken
Description: Seven new color themes for Basic Boxes! Four by nornoriel (previews are here and also more previews over here), three by rising (previews are here), and all of them lovely.

Bug 3569: add Tumblr to ExternalSites
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: metawidget
Description: When this is live, you'll be able to do link people's Tumblr accounts, with a special Tumblr userhead and everything. You'd type in something like this: <user name="sometumblruser" site="tumblr.com"> and get something like this: sometumblruser, only with a link to their Tumblr account. [I'm not sure how to do descriptive text on that image, so I'll use this space to tell you that it's the Tumblr favicon, a small stylized letter T.] Thanks to azurelunatic for looking at the bug and pointing out that it wouldn't work til it was live (because yes, I thought I was reading the bug wrong since I tried it and it didn't work yet!)

Bug 3705: Remove references to module-photo because it doesn't exist
Category: S2 Backend
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: Some CSS referred to an old module that's since been replaced. Now it doesn't!

Bug 3595: FAQ #55 should mention that the icon browser is a paid-only feature
Category: User documentation
Patch by: denise
Description: FAQ updated--because it's mean to tell people they can do something you're not actually allowing them to do! Much nicer to say "you can do this if you have a paid account."

Bug 3597: commenting restrictions should be mentioned somewhere
Category: User documentation
Patch by: denise
Description: Similarly, if we're not going to allow you to do something, it's much nicer if we tell you what it is and why we won't let you do it. So the FAQ on anonymous comments now explains what's not allowed in anonymous comments, and a general explanation of why.

Bug 3603: Slightly incorrect error message on Transfer Points
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: Bugzilla doesn't say, but probably denise
Description: If you tried to transfer points to a community, you'd get a message saying you could only buy points for a personal journal. Now it says "transfer or buy," which has the twin virtues of being more accurate and less confusing.

Bug 3694: Misc. Themes: 10 themes
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: Lots of beautiful themes! So many that I'm not going to link to the previews, because I very quickly got lost figuring out which ones are where. (And that happened because the title says 10 but I keep counting 11.) But if you follow this bug link, you'll find links to all these lovely themes. They were made by nornoriel and rising and bindingthreads.

Bug 3691: Bases: 9 themes
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: Nine new color themes that rising made for Bases. Previews, and previews, and previews, and more previews!

Bug 2397: clean up URL structure to reflect reality
Category: Modernization
Patch by: this was a meta-bug that probably had a number of people working on it over time; it was declared finished by denise
Description: There used to be a bunch of pages whose URLs only made sense if you knew what the page used to be called. Not only could that be generally confusing, it was hard on people who thought they knew what the URL would be, because they knew the name of the page, and typed it in and didn't get to where they wanted to go. Now, while the old URLs still work--they redirect to the new ones--the pages in question have URLs that make sense with what Dreamwidth calls them!


Something I started wondering while writing this: Does using a strikethrough to say "I'm going to pretend not to say this" have any accessibility issues? How do most screenreaders interpret a strikethrough?

Comments

[azurelunatic]

Thanks for an entertaining code tour!

[aedifica]

Yay!

[denise]

This is an awesome code tour! Thank you for doing it.

(I'm not sure, but I think most screenreaders read strike-text in a different voice, the way they do with emphasis and strong text? Someone else who knows better will be able to say with more authority, though.)

[marahmarie]

JAWS can be set to change tone on HTML tags like strikethrough, but less than a year ago there was quite the debate if it should just change tone automatically without user settings being applied for that, which spawned yet another debate concerning those using assistive tech who cannot hear - since changing tone doesn't help them. Interesting stuff - the discussion I'm quoting is here:

http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=4464

VoiceOver

[tamouse]

on Mac, VoiceOver doesn't make any note of it. It will pause if you're navigating by DOM, but there's no indication of what might be special about the text.

[aedifica]

Thanks for the encouragement when I was doing it!

[marahmarie]

Re: screen reader's handling of <strike></strike>:

In the olden days, <s> and <strike> were around to allow edits and amends to web text. However they are now classed as deprecated tags, which means they still work fine (in Transitional), but there’s a set of new tags on the block – <del> and <ins> . These new tags are used together to show deleted, and the subsequently inserted text in a document.

Quoted from: http://line25.com/articles/10-html-tag-crimes-you-really-shouldnt-commit

Re: attaching hover text/alt text for accessibility to images (which is what I think you might want for the Tumblr icon?). Your code should look like this:

<img src="http://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico" alt="tumblr icon" title="tumblr icon"><b>sometumblruser</b>

[aedifica]

Cool, thank you--for this and for your comment to denise above! (I did a google search for "html strike accessibility" but didn't learn as much from it as I was hoping.)

And thanks for the image link information. It was something I knew I could look up, but I didn't have the oomph to do it right then. It's handy to know! :-)

[rhialto]

About patches by unknown persons: I'm not sure which version control system you're using (and I'm too lazy to see if I can find it somewhere ;-) but most have a feature to show line-by-line who last changed that line. (Of course it may have been changed again by somebody else in the mean time, so it makes sense to double-check). Usually this is called something like "annotate" or even "blame".

[denise]

Yeah, but, first off, the person doing the code tour usually doesn't know enough to go look things up in Mercurial (there's your answer!) and second, we have very few committers (right now fu is the only active one) -- everything else goes through the Bugzilla patch queue -- so poor Fu would get more than her fair share of blame :)

(In this case, the unknown-people were a) someone who English-stripped /poll and related files as part of another project and didn't know there was a bug open to English-strip it, and b) me, making a change to the userinfo of an official journal and then closing the bug, so that isn't even something that goes through Mercurial in the first place!)

[aedifica]

Re "blame": hee!

As denise implied, I don't know from Mercurial--I'm a very very babydev. :-)

[rhialto]

No problem :-) Everybody learns by finding things out or people looking over their shoulders saying "hey, do you see this neat feature over here?" :-)

The "blame" thing is a kind of joke of course, one that was apparently funny enough to be used in multiple version control systems. Subversion (another geeky joke!) has it, Git has it, and Mercurial, but CVS and Monotone don't. I'm not familiar enough with any others to say anything about those.

[epershand]

Perforce also has blame :)

[Awesome code tour, aedifica! I enjoyed it.]

[ninetydegrees]

(And that happened because the title says 10 but I keep counting 11.)

And that may because one was moved to another bug later on so it didn't get patched! :)

[aedifica]

*rereads bug comments* Oh, of course! :)