SignpostMarv's Blog

4 Comments

1. prokofy
   Posted October 23rd, 2006 at 1:55pm | Permalink

   Could you PLEASE stop posting these chat logs with the time stamps. They are utterly unnecessary, distract from reading the flow of the text, and make for more distended space in reprinting it. Just remove time stamping in preferences.

2. Cheri Horton
   Posted October 23rd, 2006 at 2:35pm | Permalink

   Correction for the record, line 242: I meant vulnerable targets, not moving targets.

   I need to practice my public texting…

3. Cheri Horton
   Posted October 23rd, 2006 at 2:36pm | Permalink

   Line 242 on Page 2, that is!

4. SignpostMarv
   Posted October 24th, 2006 at 4:57am | Permalink

   @ Cheri:
   Sorry for not correcting earlier as you asked, it’s been corrected now :-)

   @ Prokofy:
   No.

   The XHTML chat log format I am using is a combination of the format described in Tantek Çelik’s 2003 presentation on The Elements of Meaningful XHTML, and the abbr design pattern.

   I alter the format of the SL chat logs so as to improve readability to a certain degree, and to provide some CSS hooks for customisation of display, but I do not alter the context- the order messages were displayed, and when they were displayed.

   If the timestamps bother you that much, it’s a case of using a custom stylesheet or browser userscript (all modern browsers support userscripts one way or the other, including IE) to inject the following CSS rule:

   blockquote p abbr:first-child{ display: none ; }

   While your point about interupting the flow of text is a valid one, however- for the purposes of archiving it is better to have all the original context of the chat log than it is to alter the context, especially when it only takes a single line of CSS to strip out the time stamps.