Movable Type hacks I still have to make
Reading John Gruber’s recent article about his new plugin that kills the annoying nav-commenters.gif reminded me of two annoying Movable Type hacks I still have to make every time I upgrade MT:
- Adding in a bit of code so that MT doesn’t enclose images within paragraphs.
- Removing a bit of code so that MT doesn’t launch comment URLs in new windows.
Now I can sympathize with MT on wanting to enclose all of my images within paragraphs because images are usually related to the surrounding paragraph. So it seems okay to do this:
<p><img src="image.gif" width="100" height="100" alt="description" /> This is an image.</p>
But 95% of the time, bloggers are including images in their entries like this:
This is a paragraph
<img src="image.gif" width="100" height="100" alt="description" />This is another paragraph
So taking that img and wrapping it in a couple of p’s isn’t going to add much meaning to the markup. To correct for that handful of mistakes that MT is going to make, I make the no-p-around-img hack every time.
The second hack is a completely different story. Opening links in new windows is sometimes confusing and often more annoying than helpful. Not to mention it’s so 2000. Frankly, I’m embarrassed that my CMS does it by default, so I make the kill-target-blank hack every time.
What’s your take on these hacks? Should I still make them or do we really live in world where images are always parts of paragraphs and links to external sites should open in new windows by default?
- 2 Mar 05
- hacks, html, john gruber, movable type, software
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