bloodmachine

a place in the dark

architect of other worlds

cyberstatic neon angel


concept artist + game dev

code coven IGM '22 ๐Ÿ”ฎ

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moderator @galaxydevzone


portfolio:

machinedream.notion.site

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jessfromonline
@jessfromonline

...what would you all want in it? this would be similar to the markdown cheatsheet and especially aimed at people with very little HTML/CSS experience!

what are you unable to do in the post composer that you see other users do and would want a simple explanation of how to achieveโ€”if it can be done simply?

even better: what HTML/CSS formatting have you had to look up coposts and either eventually accomplished or frustratedly given up on because you couldn't make it work on cohost? actual example cases are ideal!



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This is a quirk of (some dialects of) Markdown. To produce paragraphs, you need either two (2) linebreaks (i.e. press Enter twice), or have two (2) trailing spaces at the end of a line. The two options will also produce different spacings.

The big one for me would be aligning elements, whether against other elements (EG image aligned to left of paragraph) or just in general. Right now, I tend to cheat it with auto-margin, but there's a lot that simply can't do.

Edit: as far as communicating all this is concerned, I'd add the markdown stuff that isn't already there to the markdown page and then add a link to the bottom for all the cool HTML/CSS stuff. Call it "Advanced Tricks" or something.

Another vote for mid-post images.

Text alignment/justification.

Saying this as a moderately-expressive CSS Crimer: how positioning interacts with transform operations. Much of my frustrations have come from trying to scale and rotate something, and it also ends up translated half-way across the page. I'm sure this is do to some aspect of the CSS positioning model that I simply don't know.

Common considerations for cross-browser display, mobile, and accessibility. At least being aware of "do it like this, because doing it like that Only Works On Chrome."

something I want to know how to do is asides, blockquotes, basically anything that shows up as a differently formatted indented paragraph, maybe with a background, with the implication that you can skip it. I tried > formatting which almost does what I want, but it adds quotation marks that I don't want. I've seen people use fancy CSS for this though

i think the coolest little trick i would like to be able to do is get some kind of inline footnote so I can still put silly notes halfway through a sentence in lengthy posts without making everyone scroll down and up. this seems almost possible but the details tag only ever forms its own paragraph and i am too bad at css to figure out how to do anything more complex

what fonts or families are likely to work across platforms and what they look like, so I don't keep going back to the same "CSS font stack" page from 2007. basic guide to margins, padding, and flexboxes in a cohost-appropriate context.

a variety of useful snippets with a copy to clipboard button.

the difference between divs, spans, and ps

The CSS I frustratedly gave up on was making something rotate, which I wanted for a theorem I was proving. That was before the hamburger menu in the upper left rotated; I've been meaning to go back to that post and see if I could get it working.

Thanks for the chance to make suggestions. Some thoughts:

  • If there's an easy explanation for how to include footnotes, that would be nice, especially for longer chosts. I've seen other people producing footnotes in their chosts.
  • Also, it would be nice to have an explanation for how to place images within a chost, rather than just at the top of it, and especially if it's possible to avoid hosting the images on an external site. I can fairly quickly figure out how to do that on something like Wordpress, but still haven't figured it out here.
  • Quoted blocks of text here render all quotes in Italic, which is mostly fine except for when I am quoting something already in Italics, like a book title mentioned in a paragraph of text. I have no idea if it's possible to then force the book title to appear un-Italicised for contrast? Basically, a quick idea of how to further manage text within quotes (if it's possible to do that at all) would be useful.

Details and summary were ones where I really benefited by looking at guides. And prechoster has been very useful for messing around with things.

When the fizzbuzz challenge was going on, I was trying to make a click counter but ended up giving up after I found a few things that I couldnโ€™t do.

  • HTML forms didnโ€™t work but I imagine those could be security problems.
  • I tried to add custom css properties to act as a sort of variable for counting, but they didnโ€™t seem to be supported. I donโ€™t know if thereโ€™s security implications, but it wouldnโ€™t surprise me.
  • I tried to use pseudo elements but couldnโ€™t due to the limitations of inline css. (I think I was trying to do something like the checkbox hack with details/summary?) Either way, I think this is more an inline css limitation than a Cohost one.

I have a feeling there are very good reasons for these limitations, but a guide that lists the exact limitations would be very helpful regardless!

Finding this kinda late but:

  • Some kind of example on how you can wrap markdown bits with html to create a post that uses both.
  • How to use anchor tags and the id attribute to hyperlink to sections of a post, as well as explaining that user-content- is prepended to user-defined ids (e.g. <div id="eggbug"></div> compiles to <div id="user-content-eggbug"></div>)
  • Seconding considerations for mobile devices, I use % and rem units quite often to make my css crimes scale correctly across different screen sizes. Dunno if this would be out of the scope for a guide on basic html formatting, though.

in reply to @jessfromonline's post: