ao3 woes (code edition)

[adevyish]

So you’ve spent hours writing the perfect CSS. AO3 isn’t letting you preview your HTML and work skin together, but that’s fine, you have a local test file and it looks great there. You post your fic. AO3 mangles your HTML. Its CSS rules overwrite yours. You hotfix patches and break the randomest things four different times. Your fixes are not showing up in Firefox because it’s getting cached at some layer and you can’t figure out where, but it’s fine once you log in. Every time you edit your fic, AO3 multiples the number of newlines in your fic summary. You edit it again to get rid of your newlines, but accidentally paste your author’s note into your fic. You edit it again and the summary newlines respawn. You completely break part of your CSS because in your quest for enough specificity to override AO3 you went down the wrong road. Someone has already commented on your fic.

(Anyway I have the world’s nicest fake SMS, tweets, and Twitter DMs using minimal HTML, and they are readable and look vaguely like what they’re supposed to be even when you turn creator’s style off. Fic here.)

Comments

[kephiso]

Oof... The duplicating newlines are part of the reason I turned away from using all-italics in my summaries, delineating excerpt from summary with a horizontal rule...

That sounds like a pain, but yay for having gotten it to work in the end!

[adevyish]

Oh that’s smart! I didn’t realize the italics were the cause D:

[kephiso]

Yeah... It happens ime with all html code that spans the entire line, I want to say – so a line consisting of a link in an author's note will also progressively accumulate empty lines above it. It might also be lines starting with formatted text, but it's been a while since i had it happen, so I'm not entirely sure rn

[momijizukamori]

Yeah the AO3 HTML parser is Bad, unfortunately. Congrats on winning the battle though

[adevyish]

Why is it adding <p>s inside my <div>s 😭

[momijizukamori]

Because it tries really hard to be psychic about turning line breaks into paragraphs but it turns out this is hard and the parser is not very good at it.

Also they save to DB after mangling it with the parser.

[adevyish]

To be fair, I’d rather they save to DB after mangling so I can see exactly how they mangled it when I reopen the editor D:

What I would do for a "raw code" checkbox…