phil ringnalda

I do believe I’ve found my place in the University of Blogaria. Professor Salo of the Linguistics Department is working on a remake of Chaplain AKMA‘s Blogger template, and was in need of a roadmap to Blogger’s template tags, and I’m her dusty citation! I hereby nominate myself for the position of Battered Reference Book With Only A Little Purple Highlighting.

Leaping ahead in her markover to the juiciest and thorniest part: the archive links will be troublesome. Unlike kinder blogging tools, barring some server-side scripting Blogger only offers the choice between a separate archive index page and using Javascript to include the links in the main page and individual archive pages. Alas, thanks to the inaccessibility of Javascript, some compromise will be required.

No doubt a sensible designer of accessible, valid pages would compromise by scrapping the decision to keep it like it was, and simply say “the script has to go: from now on, you’ll have a separate archive index page.” (And I do have another dusty citation for that decision.) However, there is an alternative: at the expense of clear and simple code, it’s possible to have a page which will function as both Javascript and HTML source. The fragile and incomprehensible barrage of comment tags required to hide the (X)HTML from the Javascript and the Javascript from the (X)HTML doesn’t do a thing to make the code maintainable, but it does work to provide more usable archive links in the actual blog page for browsers that understand Javascript, while providing straight (X)HTML links in a separate page for anything that doesn’t. Add in a script from my Blogger archive script generator to change the dates from the Blogger default of 01/20/2002-01/26/2002, a format that only makes sense in the US and few other countries, to something like Jan. 20, 2002 – Jan. 26, 2002, and AKMA’s archives should be as pretty and accessible as the rest of the page, even if they aren’t quite as neat and clean under the hood.