Wapsi Square Forum

I've noticed some changes/anomalies in the site during the past couple of weeks... looks like CSS formatting changes have been made. There seem to be some anomalies which make the site display less-than-wonderful on some devices... I wonder whether other people are noticing similar things.

• The comic itself now seems to sit on top of a large white background rectangle. The background rectangle is quite wide, and as a result the main page is too wide to display normally on smaller devices (e.g. an original iPad tablet or a Nexus 7). On these devices the comic with its background end up being "pushed down" to below the first floating ad, rather than being displayed to the right of the ad. Doesn't look good to my eye. It's as if the page CSS has been optimized for really big windows (say, 1200 wide or more) and doesn't adapt well to narrower windows. Oddly, it looks OK on a Nexus 4 smartphone, which runs Android just like the Nexus 7 and has a smaller screen... very odd.
• Here in the forums, when a message is "quoted" in a reply, an icon appears to the left of the name of the person being quoted. On some devices this looks OK. On my old iPad it looks very strange - it's taller than the text but the text actually ends up being displayed on top of the icon, as if the offset or width is fouled up. Not sure what's happening here.
• The W3C CSS validator at https://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ says that there are some minor errors in the CSS formatting for the site (a bad tag or two).

Anybody else noticing these, or other strange appearances or behaviors?

I don't remember being able to click directly on the comic image to take you to the next one before so I am assuming that is one of the upgrades.

Dave wrote:

• The comic itself now seems to sit on top of a large white background rectangle. The background rectangle is quite wide, and as a result the main page is too wide to display normally on smaller devices (e.g. an original iPad tablet or a Nexus 7). On these devices the comic with its background end up being "pushed down" to below the first floating ad, rather than being displayed to the right of the ad. Doesn't look good to my eye. It's as if the page CSS has been optimized for really big windows (say, 1200 wide or more) and doesn't adapt well to narrower windows. Oddly, it looks OK on a Nexus 4 smartphone, which runs Android just like the Nexus 7 and has a smaller screen... very odd.

It sounds like the size of the site has been expanded for the same reason I made my custom CSS file. Some of the old comics were wider than the page could support and were therefore being displayed smaller to fit the page. If you do an archive binge I'm sure they will look bigger now. The best solution would be some sort of dynamic layout but I have no clue how hard that would be to implement.

Looks the same to me. No changes.

KFHDX 7(Kindle Fire).

It shows on both of my laptops just fine...must be a bitty screen thing...

Looked bad on Chrome, but ok on Safari.

I use Firefox and a Linux variant, I too noticed changes, but didn't really start to actually notice them until you brought it up...

jwhouk wrote:Looked bad on Chrome, but ok on Safari.

It was wierded out on Chrome for me last week, but it seems to be fixed now. I hadn't even noticed the Disquis comments till someone mentioned them here.

I was traveling and offline most of the weekend.

Jabberwonky wrote:It shows on both of my laptops just fine...must be a bitty screen thing...

My bitty KFHD 7 tiny screen shows no changes...seven inch screen.

DinkyInky wrote:

Jabberwonky wrote:It shows on both of my laptops just fine...must be a bitty screen thing...

My bitty KFHD 7 tiny screen shows no changes...seven inch screen.

*shrugs* I'm getting it fine. I'm not into the programming enough to be much help except for handing the coders screwdrivers or wrenches...

The archive page also seems to have had a major change... only one view of the archive, and it's got everything in one big page. No more year-by-year.

On my pad it's not easy to read... grey text and blue links, right on top of the site background graphic, with no white interlayer to help the text and links stand out.

Dave wrote:The archive page also seems to have had a major change... only one view of the archive, and it's got everything in one big page. No more year-by-year.

On my pad it's not easy to read... grey text and blue links, right on top of the site background graphic, with no white interlayer to help the text and links stand out.

Default browser, or custom? FF has a developmental android browser...PitA to sideload on my Kindle, but less touchy/feely than Dolphin...might help.

DinkyInky wrote:

Dave wrote:The archive page also seems to have had a major change... only one view of the archive, and it's got everything in one big page. No more year-by-year.

On my pad it's not easy to read... grey text and blue links, right on top of the site background graphic, with no white interlayer to help the text and links stand out.

Default browser, or custom? FF has a developmental android browser...PitA to sideload on my Kindle, but less touchy/feely than Dolphin...might help.

Default browser... this is an old (original model) iPad, due for retirement, running an outdated version of Safari. I supect the browser is simply so old that it cannot properly interpret or cope with some of the formatting directives in the site's updated CSS.

I do see some anomalies on a couple of Android devices I use, running Lollipop... need to investigate further to figure out what's going on there.

Dave wrote:

DinkyInky wrote:

Dave wrote:The archive page also seems to have had a major change... only one view of the archive, and it's got everything in one big page. No more year-by-year.

On my pad it's not easy to read... grey text and blue links, right on top of the site background graphic, with no white interlayer to help the text and links stand out.

Default browser, or custom? FF has a developmental android browser...PitA to sideload on my Kindle, but less touchy/feely than Dolphin...might help.

Default browser... this is an old (original model) iPad, due for retirement, running an outdated version of Safari. I suspect the browser is simply so old that it cannot properly interpret or cope with some of the formatting directives in the site's updated CSS.

I do see some anomalies on a couple of Android devices I use, running Lollipop... need to investigate further to figure out what's going on there.

Ah. My son has been talking of spending his very large self-savings on getting an ipad. Because of one game. Trying to talk him out of it, because parental controlling multiple devices will drive me nuts, especially if he buys it himself.
Try to explain to an impressionable ten year old that has spoiled friends with houses full of tech that even if he buys it, I make the rules regarding it. Because said "friends" parents apparently enable the behaviour.
This is also why I've not called some of the parents that gave me numbers. I simply do not want him going there. Only one is on the approved list, and I've had to cancel hang out time because the whole house got sick...and I'm heading into round two.

One thing I just noticed; when going back to much earlier 'strips', it now places the right hand edge of the image off the screen to the right.

I have to then click on the slider at the bottom to bring the image back centered,

if I choose to try and center the image with the arrow keys it thinks I want the next days' strip and advances me one day...

for me, the only real change i see is that Monica is no longer sitting on the bar at the top... i guess that she's no longer the main character, huh...

scantrontb wrote:for me, the only real change i see is that Monica is no longer sitting on the bar at the top... i guess that she's no longer the main character, huh...

I do miss that

The site CSS seems to have changed again a bit over the weekend. The strip pages (home and archive) now display fine on my old iPad, without the excessively large white background which forced the browser to spread things out vertically. Looks as good now as it did before the recent reworking.