I’ve had some trouble here and there with reading profiles due to their aesthetic set up, and I noticed someone having similar problems on the Help forums. I was wondering if there was a setting that could be enacted that would allow people’s designs to be essentially ignored and let you view them as any other profile? Maybe this could be flicked on and off with each profile? Or maybe not? Aesthetics are important and all, but sometimes they really just get in the way, yknow?
There are ways to turn CSS off I the browser, but the problem with that or other methods of giving profiles a default template is that, due to some of the methods used to fancy things up, many profiles would become utter nonsense. Decorative text characters, special and direly important alignment, headers that are actually images rather than text, text that has been separately colored for some specific purpose... Even just looking at some profiles on my phone instead of my laptop, some profiles turn into a puzzling mess of trying to figure out what actually connects to what.
I meant specifically for user profiles rather than character profiles but I know that would be a problem it’s just, how would they be over come?
Novalyyn wrote:
There are ways to turn CSS off I the browser, but the problem with that or other methods of giving profiles a default template is that, due to some of the methods used to fancy things up, many profiles would become utter nonsense. Decorative text characters, special and direly important alignment, headers that are actually images rather than text, text that has been separately colored for some specific purpose... Even just looking at some profiles on my phone instead of my laptop, some profiles turn into a puzzling mess of trying to figure out what actually connects to what.
These all sound like the exact reasons you'd want to be able to turn off custom CSS though? It would be the same as having Epicness expire and having the character profile default to the previous non-Epic template. If the user chooses to adjust their profile to such a capacity that it becomes nonfunctional without supporting CSS, then they made a conscious choice to render the profile inaccessible to a group of people and at that point, it's 100% on them.
I would honestly love to be able to toggle a 'default' (maybe the minimalist grey?) template so that a user can just see the profile and have access to it. This would also allow a user to view a profile in a responsive template in case the creator of the template didn't add that support, making it much more difficult to access the profile otherwise.
As for userprofiles, they currently don't rely on CSS but only work with a built-in editor, but even there some people can make choices that render their profile useless to a wide range of users. I don't know what the plans are for 2.0 and Epic customization, but I would also like to be able to view an Epic user's profile without custom colors/css to make it readable in case they made design choices that clash with how my eyes function.
I'm aiming for something that might less turn off BBCode as it would switch off what ever allows people to change the background color of their userprofiles, which I am currently assuming *Isn't* bbcode. I imagine that the CSS templates would run on a similar code to userprofiles but I also don't have a single idea how that all works.
Mejasoulfruit wrote:
I'm aiming for something that might less turn off BBCode as it would switch off what ever allows people to change the background color of their userprofiles, which I am currently assuming *Isn't* bbcode. I imagine that the CSS templates would run on a similar code to userprofiles but I also don't have a single idea how that all works.
BBCode and CSS are technically two different things on the RPR. BBCode affects only the text that the code is wrapped around, whereas CSS affects everything that matches a certain criteria.
Code:
[color=purple]This bit of coding turns this particular piece of text purple.[/color]
This code only affects this piece of writing: This bit of coding turns this particular piece of text purple. But everything else in this post is styled normally. This is what BBCode does.
CSS on character profiles on the other hand has a small piece of coding at the top of the page, that can affect all the text on the page. So by having a small piece of coding that says 'Turn every piece of text inside a paragraph purple', you're affecting everything at once. You don't need to use BBCode around each piece of text individually. CSS is powerful in that it can do a LOT more than just change text color, you can reorder entire segments on a profile, hide them, display them, change what they look like, where they appear etc. etc.
User profiles work a bit differently. They also rely on CSS, but Kim had reasons for not allowing us to use custom CSS directly on user profiles (if I remember correctly, it's because CSS can be really powerful), so she built an editor that lets you pick colors only. So the editor 'writes' the CSS for your user profile and applies the color changes behind the scenes, but you currently can't do more than that besides adding BBCode to the text you can edit in your profile.
I think the issue you're describing is that some people are making aesthetic choices that hinder your ability to read the information on the profile. The point of RPR is kind of to have information and communicate that information, so it would be nice to be able to turn off someone's custom CSS (both on user and character profiles) so you can access plain information.
I'd even wager that this is an accessibility issue. Colorblind individuals may need this in order to be able to participate and view profiles, depending on how someone styles their profiles.
I am actually in favor of having a "default" of some sort that that can be switched into in either case, but especially for user profiles. For characters, something might be intentionally unreadable because it's meant to be a secret that only the creator can see properly, etc.
With the things I mentioned, those are things that could very well become harder or might vanish entirely (despite possible importance) if the user's design is removed. And... users with a profile that needs to be toggled have already "made the decision" to exclude some folks. Some for intentionally being hard to read, some for just not bothering to build something that makes any sense in a mobile view, and BBCode use is actually worse for that than CSS.
The description given for what BBCode is is... accurate enough for what is seen to happen. Pardon the following maybe-unnecessary presumptions based on what I can remember of how stuff like that works.
With the things I mentioned, those are things that could very well become harder or might vanish entirely (despite possible importance) if the user's design is removed. And... users with a profile that needs to be toggled have already "made the decision" to exclude some folks. Some for intentionally being hard to read, some for just not bothering to build something that makes any sense in a mobile view, and BBCode use is actually worse for that than CSS.
The description given for what BBCode is is... accurate enough for what is seen to happen. Pardon the following maybe-unnecessary presumptions based on what I can remember of how stuff like that works.
If you wanna see
BBCode is more of an authorized HTML injector.
HTML is what any given static page on the internet is built in. Some use an assortment of other languages to make the page more dynamic (changable), and multimedia stuff is separate, but HTML is the foundation of a page. CSS is used
to make that foundation pretty. But there was a time when CSS wasn't really a thing yet, and it is possible to style a page within the HTML itself (in-line styling). This is frowned upon since it makes changing that styling much more difficult.
Most sites "cleanse" text entered because some things, even just HTML, can be very dangerous to input. BBCode was designed to allow people to have more control over how their postings appear without risking malicious code being entered. The way it works is be representing something else. So, for example...
tells the machine to instead show
(The em is the current standard of "emphasis" instead of the old inline-styling method of i as "italic" so that machines can more accurately read how to present the info, of particular importance for accessibility.)
That one's not too big a deal. But going back to the color example...
actually tells the machine to write the following on the page
But in-line styling is difficult to overwrite. CSS has ways of declaring one style more important than another and it's very important to have that ability, but the only way that CSS can overwrite in-line styling is if you basically tell it "HEY THIS IS A STYLING EMERGENCY" and yes, it takes a machine equivalent of yelling to do that. This means that if someone is using BBCode in the page, that is likely to override attempts to template swap, since templates rely on CSS. To get CSS to override it, you'd have to write a list where every item is equally the most important thing ever.
Fortunately, I'm pretty sure that Epic member page design actually creates its own special CSS sheet. So for anything styled through the styling tool, it should be as simple as switching that off.
But again, that wouldn't change any BBCode stuff.
HTML is what any given static page on the internet is built in. Some use an assortment of other languages to make the page more dynamic (changable), and multimedia stuff is separate, but HTML is the foundation of a page. CSS is used
to make that foundation pretty. But there was a time when CSS wasn't really a thing yet, and it is possible to style a page within the HTML itself (in-line styling). This is frowned upon since it makes changing that styling much more difficult.
Most sites "cleanse" text entered because some things, even just HTML, can be very dangerous to input. BBCode was designed to allow people to have more control over how their postings appear without risking malicious code being entered. The way it works is be representing something else. So, for example...
Code:
[i]text[/i] in BBCode
tells the machine to instead show
Code:
<i>text</i> or <em>text</em> in HTML
(The em is the current standard of "emphasis" instead of the old inline-styling method of i as "italic" so that machines can more accurately read how to present the info, of particular importance for accessibility.)
That one's not too big a deal. But going back to the color example...
Code:
[color=purple]This bit of coding turns this particular piece of text purple.[/color]
actually tells the machine to write the following on the page
Code:
<span style="color:purple;">This bit of coding turns this particular piece of text purple.</span>
But in-line styling is difficult to overwrite. CSS has ways of declaring one style more important than another and it's very important to have that ability, but the only way that CSS can overwrite in-line styling is if you basically tell it "HEY THIS IS A STYLING EMERGENCY" and yes, it takes a machine equivalent of yelling to do that. This means that if someone is using BBCode in the page, that is likely to override attempts to template swap, since templates rely on CSS. To get CSS to override it, you'd have to write a list where every item is equally the most important thing ever.
Fortunately, I'm pretty sure that Epic member page design actually creates its own special CSS sheet. So for anything styled through the styling tool, it should be as simple as switching that off.
But again, that wouldn't change any BBCode stuff.
Sanne wrote:
These all sound like the exact reasons you'd want to be able to turn off custom CSS though? It would be the same as having Epicness expire and having the character profile default to the previous non-Epic template.
ANYWHO. Let us do an experiment. I went digging through profiles and obtained the Minimalist Grey style sheet:
https://www.rprepository.com/templates/2.0/stylesheets/minimalist/style.css
So we're going to hold onto that for a moment. Testing this out with one of my own characters, Ceci, who uses a non-Epic style but:
https://www.rprepository.com/c/cecille
Assuming you're using Chrome (also possible in Firefox, but Chrome is my browser of choice) right-click somewhere near the top of the page and hit 'Inspect'. This will bring up your editor.
Making sure you're under 'Elements' find the <header></header> tag. Open that up, scroll down past the javascript; you'll find a bunch of .css stylesheets linked. Your main Profile Theme is usually the last to second last--scroll down until you find a sheet named something similar to your profile (mine being DNA_teal).
Double-click on the actual linked style-sheet; it'll allow you to edit it. From here, copy and paste the 'minimalist' stylesheet linked above. Hit enter.
Huzzah!
It's a lot of silly actual work and won't stay that way page-to-page, but. After work I'll poke into the User RPRs as well; it'll be something similar.
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