Recent Changes @ FreeRepublic

[John Robinson]

A few changes have been made to the forum over the past couple days.

• All replies, and for consistency all articles, are now wrapped in HTML <BLOCKQUOTE>s. This indents the text on both left and right margins. It should no longer be possible to convincingly spoof replies.

• An HTML filter has been installed into the forum software. The primary job of this filter is to remove unsafe HTML constructs. As a side-effect and benefit, it closes open tags. No more HTML shotguns.

• Due to the above mentioned filter, the STYLE attribute has been disabled. Though it has many legit uses, it was used to position text and images at the top of a thread, or in other unsavory places. The STYLE attribute will make a comeback once a style filter is written.

• Since the STYLE attribute was disabled, the use of <SPAN STYLE="background-color: xxxx"> to highlight portions of text was also disabled. To compensate, the <EM> tag has be enhanced for highlighting purposes. At a later time the HTML sequence used to highlight text may change.

• <BLOCKQUOTE> has been enhanced for it's intended purpose: quoting blocks of text. Unfortunately, <BLOCKQUOTE> is often used to indent text without implying a quote, and therefore at a later time the HTML sequence used to quote text may change.

• A quick-and-dirty program now exists allowing you to customize the appearance of Free Republic articles. To use a custom style sheet, use your favorite style sheet editor (or plain text editor) to create a style sheet, save the file to your hard drive, and then follow this link to upload your style sheet to Free Republic.

  This is a technological preview and is geared for a technical audience. At a later date a kinder gentler interface will be created.

A sample customized style sheet:

BODY
{
    BACKGROUND-COLOR: ivory
}
EM
{
    FONT-STYLE: normal;
    BACKGROUND-COLOR: #eeee00
}
BLOCKQUOTE
{
    FONT-FAMILY: "Bookman Old Style"
}
BLOCKQUOTE BLOCKQUOTE
{
    BORDER-TOP: black thin solid;
    PADDING-BOTTOM: 1%;
    PADDING-TOP: 1%;
    BORDER-BOTTOM: black thin solid;
    FONT-STYLE: italic
}

[Star Traveler]

You said --
Questions?

For some web pages that are uplooaded here (for comment) there are other links that are not "hard-coded" into the page and therefore, they show up as part of the "freerepublic.com" web site (which is wrong).

So, the following is used to corred it.

          -- BASE HREF="http://www.some-web-site.com" --

However, that does not seem to work anymore. Is this never going to work? If so, then it means that people have to go into these documents and "hard-code" the web address, which is a lot of work (which probably won't get done). And then, that means that people (FReepers) will get a lot of "non-existant pages" on FreeRepublic (as a result).

Please put that functionality back in, if you could.

[Illbay]

Oh. I guess the only place I've seen that was in the "parody" threads like the one about everyone falling down and worshipping Bush.

[The Thin Man]

Sorry, I can't understand a word you wrote, but I'm sure whatever you did will be good. %-)

[Denver Ditdat]

bump

[StoneColdGOP]

No kidding. I'd just as soon prefer what we had yesterday. Much simpler.

[jgrubbs]

It looks like every post and response is using

I like this style sheet thing, I got red, white and blue scroll bars now :-)

[jgrubbs]

That was supposed to say that every post is using <blockquote> but I forgot to use the ASCII characters for the < and >

[Mama_Bear]

Did you keep those CSS sites?

LOL! I sure did. Whenever you are ready, just holler, I'll send them over.
You go first, then 'splain it to me. I am completely lost. :-(

[steveegg]

Guess my CSS needs a bit more work for IE6, but looks great in Netscape 4.77.

[classygreeneyedblonde]

I know I just learned the other stuff. hmmmmmmm well looks like I have more to learn.....:))What and where do I get a style sheet more importantly how do u use it.....:(

[steveegg]

Did some experimenting with margins. You can optimize for either IE or Netscape 4.x, but not both (I can't comment on Netscape 6 because frankly I don't recommend it except to "multi-vote" online polls). A comment of margin-left: px will result in IE pushing things back to the left edge of the page, while it does nothing for Netscape. A comment of margin-left: -40 will bring the margin to the left edge of the page in Netscape, but will bring the margin off the page and screen in IE.

[jgrubbs]

I would recomend using TopStyle for Style Sheets, unless you just like using notepade :-)

You can get TopStyle or TopStyle Lite online at http://www.bradsoft.com/topstyle/download/index.asp

[ST.LOUIE1]

You go first, then 'splain it to me. I am completely lost. :-(

Oh, no ya don't!

I barely get by posting a reply.

Ladies first. : )

That goes for 'ladybears' too.

[StoneColdGOP]

I have no idea, I've never heard of a style sheet, much less know how the thing works.

[Mr_Magoo]

John,

On 2 threads the itallics won't go away, I tried adding about 75 < /i >'s to the post to no avail. When I view source I don't even see an < i > tag to start 'em off!

See:
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3bb3f86e349a.htm
and
http://www.FreeRepublic.com/forum/a3bb467aa0cc4.htm

Thanks

[IRtorqued]

and here I thought some one had left a blockquote and font style tag open right up until I viewed the code and saw the demarcation line in threads from the other day.

[Dan Day]

On 2 threads the itallics won't go away, I tried adding about 75 < /i >'s to the post to no avail.

I've had the opposite problem. On a few replies, I had to do some serious tweaking just to be able to italicize a paragraph in the middle of my post.

What seemed to finally get the job done was swapping the order of my <p><i> tag pairs, but lord knows why that should make any difference... It never used to.

[xm177e2]

I will miss being able to monkey around with FR =(