Wednesday, June 29
Blogger is "fixed"
Blogger now offers a switch to get rid of that damn <div> that they were automatically throwing in. I've already thrown my hissy fits to both support and to bloggerbuzz.
You know, the biggest fix you could actually do is stop putting in HTML code! Period! Get rid of the inserted <div>s!
You've finally gotten rid of the <p class="mobile-post"> that you were wrapping email gateway messages with (then again, that may have been with text messages, now that I've got HTML messages working, you might not be wrapping that, since I'm not seeing it on my latest linkblog entry - it's been a b---h because the program I was using, I lost the source to on a hard disk crash, and all I really needed to fix the issue I was having was add a -html switch to my email program. But I've managed to get that reconstituted, so that's become a non-issue).
Blogger really has no business whatsoever inserting any kind of HTML into our blogs. I don't care what kind of new functionality you are adding. If adjustments need to be made, they need to be made in the template itself, not kludged into everybody's blog, and kludge is exactly what's going on. Because at this rate, adding more kludges are you go along is just going to break more and more stuff.
I can understand that Blogger is in the middle between a rock and a hard place, but adding new functionality shouldn't require screwing over somebody's site formatting. As one of the first to have blogged about this (judging from PubSub and Technorati), the reports that I've heard are that this change snackered several of the templates that Blogger offers. I will say that this problem has finally pointed me to the source of a problem that I was having with my comments, so when I get the latest upgrade installed, I now know what to change in the CSS to make it work correctly.
I don't know, maybe a reasonable compromise of trying to shiv fixes in for those that don't want to deal with CSS and such is to have an option that states either allow us to add additions as we see fit, or no thanks, I'm responsible for my own formatting, I just want the data please, no handholding.
But I'll repeat myself again, it's my opinion that Blogger has no business whatsoever adding any kind of HTML to our output. It can break our formatting, it can break our validation even. Start thinking like Google, first, do no evil, and adding HTML capriciously is exactly that, doing evil.
I'm sorry to be ranting, but this is definately rant material. And I'm finally seeing something reported about this, when I (and others) started reporting Thursday night. I still haven't gotten an email back, but then again, I haven't seen anything but auto responses for the past 5 things that I've reported to Blogger. Zip. Not even a screw you, we're not changing it. So I'm getting real confused about what's what.
It would be nice if somebody were actually kind enough to blog what kinds of changes that Blogger is making, especially those changes that can effect users, such as the mobile-post class (yes, I can see how that might be handy - but is it really neccessary?), and then the change from accepting regular text HTML to it has to be sent as HTML mail or otherwise it's encoded. Actually, I don't see it as being nice, I pretty much think that it has to happen. And think about when you put changes in. Evidently the <div> change was made late Thursday, which meant that you might know something was wrong by Friday, but now you've got users stewing over the weekend if there is a problem. Not a good thing.
Thanks for listening.
I have taken out the "fix" as I found out that it was still causing problems on my blog, I just hadn't scrolled down far enough to notice. I'll be changing the sticky a bit after I publish this.
Tags: blogger
Permanent link posted by bytehead @ 6/29/2005 04:00:00 PM 
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