We didn't do anything particularly exciting on day five either. I did have to call into my former workplace and their internal associate support number! That was fun. My mom needed my paystubs pretty urgently, and the site they were using for those required me to make a new account, and I wasn't able to get through the process without it erroring out. I managed, thankfully. I swear, this trip has just been blessed with insane luck and RNG; the airports went fine, the plane went fine, we navigated everything correctly first try, and I was able to do stuff involving work and my social security number just fine while out of the country.
In fuzzier and more interesting news, Caby drew this adorable self-indulgent skateboarding Red, and we worked on Gamedachi stuff. Gamedachis are an open species Caby came up with for sentient little plushies with screen faces, and we wound up talking about them a lot on the trip. Gamedachis still weren't officially public at the time, so I pushed Caby to finish up the, like, single graphic she still had to do for the toyhou.se world and make it official! I also started working on a spergy Gamedachi hacking and reverse-engineering page for Meowcities. That was fun, I should get back to that soon.
This was the graphic, by the way.
I also did some work patching some of our old sites on archives.somnol. I take a very "post what was intended, not what was scraped" approach with archives. We make mistakes, things don't necessarily work right, and part of what I do when I move stuff to archives is optimize PNGs, speed up asset loading, and fix any broken scripts or dead links. I want them to be authentic, but I don't care so much about accuracy. If anything, a page that works better than when it was originally scraped is just more pleasing to browse.
So I had this epiphany, as I was staring at a broken mari_nc2 in Retrozilla. There's this display bug that happens where HTML5 semantic elements display as crappy little boxes in the top-left corner of where they should be, not containing all the text they should be. Of course, back then, I used nothing but HTML5 semantic elements, and worse yet, I have a habit of making the container background contrast the page background, and the text in the container nearly the same tone as the background—meaning invisible text in retro browsers that can't handle those elements.
The epiphany was that this happens because RetroZilla, and retro browsers in general, treat elements they don't recognize as inline elements, not block-level elements. Inline elements don't take up the full width of their parent container, and they can't have their own widths set. I realized, if I went through and set all the new HTML5 semantic elements to display: block;, this would take care of a huge chunk of the rendering problems on those pages.
/* archives.somnol patch for HTML5 semantic elements in retro browsers */
main, header, footer, section, nav, article, figure, figcaption, details, aside, summary { display: block; }
These sites still aren't perfect in every case, but that would require completely rebuilding their layouts to not use things like custom fonts or CSS spritesheets, and that's not particularly authentic. It's a fuck of a lot better than it used to be.
This actually came about thanks to a new design for archives.somnol I was putting together, but that's a story for another day, quite literally...
Also, Caby was reminded of this tweet and we spent half the trip quoting it at each other. Usually in KFCs. I'm putting it here because it's funny.