Hotbot Redesign and CSS Blunders
I applaud Hotbot for moving to an all XHTML and CSS design, even though it doesn’t quite validate. Douglas Bowman, the standards evalgelist behind the Wired and Hotbot redesign, claims that they’re working on the validation errors, so I can overlook the errors for the time being. Besides, how can I complain about measly validation errors when it boasts cool features like including multiple catalogs, custom search filters, and completely skinnable homepage and search results?
Allowing the user to upload a custom CSS file is a bold but welcome move. I was curious to play with the CSS myself, so I downloaded the CSS file that they provide and immediately noticed some errors that were a little more difficult to overlook.
First things first: comments in CSS are accomplished using C-style comments. That is, comments must be surrounded by /* and */. Using // to precede comments will not work, although it is commonly used in JavaScript and Microsoft specific development environments. Secondly, there is no text-white property in CSS, but I’ll take a wild guess and say they meant to use white-space because it uses the nowrap value.
If you want to create your own CSS for Hotbot, here is the commented CSS that I recommend you start with, free of validation errors and ready to upload.
- 17 Dec 02
- collaboration, competition, css, redesign, standards
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Comments
Zeldman reports another interesting fact about the new Hotbot: the style switch doesn’t work in Mozilla, yet they tell you to download a browser that supports standards. Amusing to say the least.
Joshua on 18 Dec 02
Why didn’t Josh Kaufmann intend the corrected HotBot CSS File? Using Scite for example you quickly get pretty good results.
TrackBack from raphb - net life on 20 Dec 02