Scripting News: Problems with expand/collapse

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

Problems with expand/collapse

Last night I changed the way Scripting News is rendered in HTML, and while it works in Firefox on the Mac (the browser that I use) it is broken in a bunch of others. This afternoon I'm going to try to get it working everywhere.

The advice from readers, some of it quite confusing, starts here.

I've got MSIE 6 running in Parallels, so as I go I'm testing there and in Firefox/Mac.

Here are the changes I'm making, in order...

1. Apparently the <a name="xxx"> element is causing a problem, the purpose of it is to enable permalinks to work within the archive pages, Colin suggests making this the name of the <div>, so that's what I did. (This got today's elements expanding and collapsing in IE, but not older days. Very weird.)

2. In the stylesheet, added width:400px; to both .show and .hide and padding-left:15px; to .show. (That successfully widened the body of each post in MSIE.)

3. I eliminated the table I was using to indent the body text. (Now the older days expand and collapse. Hurrah!)

4. Added another 5 pixels of padding for a little bit more indenting.

5. At this point it appears to work in both MSIE 6 and Firefox/Mac. I will now download Opera and try it there. (Downloaded and installed, but I can't get it to display any web pages including scripting.com. Very very strange. If you have Opera installed, could you try clicking on the pluses and minuses on scripting.com and let me know if it works. Apparently it does.)

6. Removed some old CSS and Javascript includes from the head section.

7. Added "min-width:400px;" to the .hide style, per Colin's advice.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:01:53 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Sep Nov