Why not just upload some HTML though

Apparently there’s some kind of cohost v. pillowfort beef going on, which is simultaneously entertaining and exhausting. I’ve never used either and don’t have any loyalties to declare; they both look more morally sound than Tumblr, I guess, but tbh the time in my life for signing up for services I don’t personally administer is over.

Via this drama I found out that there are apparently various utilities that generate html+css “for cohost”, bafflingly, as if cohost is the only space on the web that allows people to write html+css. Like … I don’t know how to tell you that every vanilla web page has this function. I guess everyone is just so socialmediapilled that they’re used to not having any control over text formatting? People are generating websites with some kind of soulless templating engine and are therefore unable to set the colour of a <span> or whatever? Everyone is learning frameworks without actually realising that everything they spit out is basically just HTML? Lads, you can literally just sign up for free and pseudonymous web hosting and type in whatever you like. Browsers are a miracle (let’s not talk about whatever Google is planning to do to Chrome, that discourse can stay on the fediverse where it belongs).

Anyway, “markdown plus” can do some fun stuff to text but the cohost-centredness of it is unnecessary. Just as the page that generates it can display the output without being part of the cohost.org domain, so can (whisper it) any webpage that allows inline CSS. The magic is worked by the processor itself, not by any kind of cohost-specific feature.

The obvious question: can these cool text effects be done on Dreamwidth? The answer: yes, with this One Weird Trick. The animations don’t work properly unless a certain line of CSS is added to the style, which means they only load when pages are viewed in styles that contain that CSS. They’ll never load in the site style, which users can’t modify, and they won’t load in individual users’ styles unless the user has added that line in the custom CSS editor. The non-animated features, like coloured gradients and wide text, should work across the board, although the “add plaintext version” option should be unticked, as Dreamwidth doesn’t allow spans of text to be hidden in the way it outputs.

That line of CSS is the following:

@keyframes bounce{0%,to{transform:translateY(-25%);animation-timing-function:cubic-bezier(.8,0,1,1)}50%{transform:none;animation-timing-function:cubic-bezier(0,0,.2,1)}}@keyframes spin{to{transform:rotate(360deg)}}

I’ve added it to my own journal style [and site CSS], which means that […] you will be able to open the <details> element below and see some animated text.

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