when you see “neue” you know it’s going to be pretentious

[adevyish]

It’s frustrating that to get a nice-looking Tumblr theme in 2022 you have to use Javascript, because Tumblr’s new post type (“Neue Post Format”) just does not work out of the box and all posts made with the Tumblr mobile app are now this type.

1. If a post has a single image on one row then two images on a second row, the image on the first row will load as 500px wide and display at 500px wide and the images on the second row will load as 540px wide and display at 268px wide. Some of us have high pixel density screens Tumblr! And it wouldn’t even be obvious, except the low res image is right next to the high res images.

2. The Tumblr mobile post editor apparently loves inserting empty <p> tags, or with just a <br> in them. Or <p><br>Actual paragraph here</p>. The mobile app, and I believe Tumblr’s default theme, filters this out, so casual users won’t notice the extra whitespace. Unfortunately this results in a lot of unintended whitespace for those of us with custom themes.

When I first made a Tumblr theme I could use no Javascript and everything would look good. Sigh. At least querySelectorAll exists now so I don’t have to load in a 70kb Javascript library (ha. ha.) And both of these can be fixed in a few lines of code, but that doesn’t take back the amount of time I spent with the DOM Inspector open.

PS. Custom Tumblr themes that link to external Javascript not hosted by a big CDN makes me sooo dubious. I have, uh, definitely run into issues viewing other people’s Tumblrs, to the point I had to contact Tumblr support and engage in a back and forth because the repro was tricky.

PPS. The CSS Selectors Level 4 spec looks v nice.