4chan switches to HTML5/CSS3 (SFW)
boards.4chan.org
boards.4chan.org
/b/ (the very NSFW board responsible for 4chan's notorious infamy) accounts for 30% of 4ch's traffic but the next two most popular boards /v/ (video games) and /a/ (anime and manga) are both SFW. Not that I would recommend anyone to lurk 4chan at work.
The traffic and popularity figures I mention are on Wikipedia with citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
I'd think twice before browsing either of those boards at work.
The cobbler's children have gone unshod so long!
Believe me, I have at least a few upgrades I wish were made here (fixing that "the link does not exist" bug, and making commenting/editing more friendly like Reddit), but they are not a big deal, we'll survive.
Can we at least compromise on unicode vote arrows?
Just look at the <b> tag. 10 years ago, we used it frequently. Five years ago, we were told NEVER to use it, and to use CSS instead. These days we're told it's okay to use again, because now under HTML5 it has new semantic meaning. Five years from now, by the time people have used it throughout their markup again, the attitude will change and it'll once more be verboten.
It's only the OCD CSS designers who treat every superfluous div and span as a stain upon their work. The rest of us happily use the new meaningful HTML5 structure where appropriate, and keep sprinkling on divs/spans to help guide the layout and style.
And FYI, the <b> tag wasn't supposed to be replaced by CSS, it was supposed to be replaced by <strong> in cases where you wanted to highlight a span in text. Because the act of highlighting text shouldn't be coupled to what it looks like. Unfortunately, most people can't think in semantic terms and still write web content like it's MS Word. That's why HTML is such a complex beast: because we humans constantly give ourselves too much credit, and ultimately, the web is an enormous hack job achieved through minimum effort.
I would have thought 4chan's thread format perfect to use the new <article>, <header>, and <footer> tags.
* "The new HTML should be much easier to parse, and when benchmarking the official 4chan Chrome extension, we found that it parses approximately 600% faster."
* "CORS [Cross-origin resource sharing] is now supported"
* "responsive design for mobile browsers"
The old 4chan layout didn't even wrap correctly on mobile devices (requiring tons of horizontal scrolling) - IMO, this alone is worth the rewrite.
Also as mentioned, it has a responsive layout for mobile screens.
I'm pretty sure the new markup is designed by moot (the 4chan admin/creator) himself, so it's fairly clunky for 2012 (wrapper divs and spans everywhere, inline javascript and styles), but again, it's still a vast improvement.
Much better behavior on smaller width (e.g. mobile phones), smaller, simpler markup (so faster downloading, parsing & rendering), and likely increased simplicity for extension developers.
slow clap