Friday, April 14, 2006
Styling feeds
Yesterday's entry on profiling brings up a topic I've been thinking of recently. You see, when I post code samples, they're coded up as:
<blockquote class="code">
<pre>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
int main(int argc,char *argv[])
{
printf("Hello world\n");
return(EXIT_SUCCESS);
}
</pre>
</blockquote>
Notice that bit with class="code" there? I use
CSS to format the pages here (which allow me flexibility in how things look), and for
<BLOCKQUOTE>s marked as such, they get the following bit
of CSS associated with
them:
BLOCKQUOTE.code
{
overflow: auto;
margin-bottom: 1.5em;
}
Which in browsers that support CSS, mean that those <BLOCKQUOTE>s, if
the content exceeds the calculated width of said
<BLOCKQUOTE>, then scroll bars will appear just for said
<BLOCKQUOTE> (and not as a page as a whole), thus
preserving the layout (and yes, I could do away with the
<PRE> tags, there's a reason why I don't—keep
reading).
And that's fine if you read my blog at my site.
But if you read it through an aggregator (like, say, at LiveJournal)
then all the careful styling I came up with is lost, lost, lost. And
there's a good chance that if I post
code with some really long lines it'll seriously mess up the layout you
use to read my RSS feed (and because the CSS doesn't follow the RSS feed, that's why I still use
<PRE> tags when I quote code least the code look
really strange).
Now, short of including CSS within the tags themselves (using the
STYLE attribute, and I really don't want to do
that) I don't know of any way to otherwise influence the layout of
my RSS feed. It's not
that I'm trying to preserve my “look” in RSS aggregators, but it would be nice if I could give
“hints” at least. I mean,
THIS
doesn't quite have the same impact as
THIS
See? (and yes, I do have a style for the former defined—“hotflamingdeath” if you must know)
