h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

hello

i am wanting to know if i can write gML for my personal space so i control what happens in different skins.

eg if i use purple text in alabaster, i might want the same text to be red in goo.

is this possible?


thanks,
kea.

Nope, for ideological (and other) reasons, although we have SITEFILTER we are _not_ going to have skinfilter. The idea is that the markup is general enough that the system will render it correctly in _any_ skin (even non-html ones) without users having the use layout/styling markup.

spelugx

Yeah, that's something I considered at some point in the past. Now I'm studying CS3352 at my university, which is all about making web pages (and other hypermedia, because the web will see its day one day) accessible and functional for all. Now I never want to use another tag as long as I live!

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PS Incidentally, h2g2 is the only site I know that hasn't contradicted any of the "rules" laid down by that lecturer so far (even google has!).

"PS Incidentally, h2g2 is the only site I know that hasn't contradicted any of the "rules" laid down by that lecturer so far (even google has!)."

Really? Which skin do you use?

No, it's because of its many skins it hasn't (well and other stuff too)!

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h2g2 fails twice on the same count of using presentation instead of content tags, eg. is approved whilst is not. In addition the majority of the skins use tables and attributes to do their styling, instead of stylesheets (although notably the newest h2g2 skin actually does use stylesheets , although I'm not going to mention its faults).

spelugx

The plain skin (which is still in development), in conjunction with the betsie parser, are what save h2g2 from certain death in the pits of every other website in the world's hell...

Also, being able to comment on every page (with the exception of a few, like the front page and the <./>NewUsers</.> page) and a couple of other things you don't see on normal sites.

I still have over half of the course to go, mind, so there is probably something wrong ....

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If even Google itself managed to fail...

RhoMuNuQ

Google fails by not allowing annotation (except with the dodgy resource-hogging Googlebar) and by having adverts (although they're small and out of the way) but all in all it's a very good site (particularly navigationally). Surprisingly, http://www.imdb.com/ comes out pretty good too (!) but not a patch on google _or_ h2g2

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In my opinion, both h2g2 and Google are better laid out than imdb.com

RhoMuNuQ

That's what I said, Rho! It's just that imdb has good navigational correctness... it's ok at the conceptual and user-centric levels, and pretty rubbish at the UI level (these four things are what have to be considered when designing hypermedia). h2g2 seems to be pretty excellent on all four, as does google, and BBC News.

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I agree entirely! h2g2 and Google are the two best-designed sites that I know.

RhoMuNuQ

It's one of the reasons I stuck around in the first place when I discovered h2g2... how come nobody I know has ever heard of this place?

In fact, h2g2 and CS3352 have together convinced me to completely revamp my site. There's a very early prototype at but it's way past what you see there on my local server (just not secure enough to make live yet).

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*takes a look*

Very nice!

I saw that you linked to h2g2 and Google as well!

RhoMuNuQ

Heh. Just for testing, at the moment...

It'll soon be a sort of "mind-map" where you can traverse my mind, up and down... all the things I'm thinking about and that I enjoy or hate. h2g2 will feature very prominently on there!

Watch *that* space!

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PS. It's powered by an xml variant like GuideML called "OwlML" ... take a look at for an example, although the files are now stored in a MySQL database, rather than a flat-file storage format.

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