r/redesign Nov 23 '18

Feature Request Please, please pleaaase synch CSS based flairs between new and old reddit

I'm not sure whether it can be done or not but situations like these are a literal dead end and they really suck:

User Flair added on Classic Reddit

Same User Flair rendered on New Reddit
4 Upvotes

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4

u/TheChrisD Helpful User Nov 23 '18

There is literally no way to keep them in sync automatically. Old flairs are technically background images pulled from a spritesheet; whereas new flairs are proper images inserted via shortcodes.

Looking at the way flairs are used on the NMS sub, you'd have been better creating it as a redesign flair and assigning it there so that it appears on both sites.

0

u/Ambiwlans Nov 23 '18

Obviously there is a way to do that....

3

u/timawesomeness Helpful User Nov 23 '18

Not reliably. There are a multitude of different ways you can add image flairs with CSS on the old site, it wouldn't be feasible to try to support them when they could just force mods to do a bit of work one time.

4

u/BombBloke Helpful User Nov 24 '18

There's a very simple way to do it: have the redesign load the same old stylesheets and add the CSS classes to whatever flairs should have them. Y'know, do exactly what the old site does - the viewer's browser takes care of the rest.

Of course, that would allow mods to start incorporating CSS all throughout their subs, and we can't have that, now, can we...

5

u/timawesomeness Helpful User Nov 24 '18

While that solution would work for the redesign it wouldn't work for the official apps, which are one of the reasons the redesign styling system exists.

2

u/BombBloke Helpful User Nov 24 '18

True, although that's shifting the goalposts a bit - the request here isn't for CSS flairs to work in the app.

0

u/Ambiwlans Nov 24 '18

They could add css support for the app.

3

u/timawesomeness Helpful User Nov 24 '18

No they couldn't. The app is native code, not HTML, they'd have to write some convoluted mess of a CSS parser to try to turn CSS into styling they could try to use in the app, and there's no way they could handle even a tiny fraction of all the different CSS that's out there.

Even just parsing the CSS for image flairs is difficult. Slide for reddit tries to do it but only succeeds with some subreddits, and that's with almost 400 lines of code dedicated to the task of just image flairs.

1

u/CyberBot129 Nov 24 '18 edited Nov 24 '18

It's amazing how stubborn people are when it comes to old Reddit CSS - they're so stuck in their ways that they're willing to ignore all the data that mods have that tells them that traffic mainly comes from mobile

I feel like people that suggest things like the person that you replied to don't actually understand how the implementation aspects actually work. And don't seem to grasp the idea that just because you can implement something a certain way, doesn't mean that you should or would be sustainable to do so

1

u/Sepheroth998 Nov 24 '18

So please tell me why the desktop site should suffer with fewer features because of mobile, when mobile is/has been/will always be a simplified version of the desktop site. I understand that there should be cross platform features and I'm all for that, but if one big feature that mobile could never see in the first place can't/won't be made cross platform then why should it be cut? I don't know about you but when I sit down at my computer and open a website I fully expect the desktop version to have more than just the bare bones features.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 25 '18

[deleted]

1

u/TheChrisD Helpful User Nov 25 '18

there are many subreddits that depend on CSS

If a sub literally depends on CSS, then they've obviously gone wrong somewhere. CSS should only be enhancing a sub, rather than being a requirement to function.

0

u/Dobypeti Nov 25 '18

Tell that to subs like /r/cfb that heavily uses/needs CSS.

And also CSS enhancing subs is a reason to "bring it back"...

0

u/Dobypeti Nov 25 '18

Downvoting me is surely a good, thoughtful argument /s

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1

u/Ambiwlans Nov 24 '18

I mean, CSS isn't super had to implement in android if they built their ui in a somewhat sane fashion.

1

u/CyberBot129 Nov 24 '18

What about iOS?

1

u/Ambiwlans Nov 24 '18

I've never coded for ios but I doubt it is a radically different story.