About ekw theme

printable version

About

The original history:

The ekw theme was started by ailie, who wanted to make a lightweight, .gif-free theme with tasteful colors. wharfinger stumbled in later and turned it into .gif-free bloatware with tasteful colors. Then he added ekw Preferences, which lets the user turn it into a bloated, .gif-free garish mess. Finally, to maximize the fun, wharfinger added some .gifs.

ekw differs from other E2 themes in that there are no image files used, and in its ekw Preferences feature, which allows the user to modify the display to suit his or her own preferences.

The current origin:

ekw is just one of those things that's always been there. Like Barbara Bush. If you're truly interested in its history, the above paragraphs are all you've got.

Bug reports and feature requests can go to either N-Wing or kthejoker.

FAQ

Can I back up my ekw Preferences settings?

Pikachu loves me very much. Can I collect ekw settings and trade them with my friends?

My Eye-Blasting Super Psychoactive Raspberry Lime Apocalypse color scheme is the greatest! Will you add it as a "Canned Scheme"?

Respectively: "Yes", "yes (but please see a professional about that Pikachu thing)", and "that's no longer necessary". ekw Scheme Cannery is the answer. ekw Preferences is still a more "user-friendly" way to play with your settings, but the Cannery will export your settings in a convenient, ready-to-eat package. It can also import theme settings in the same format.

Please implement such-and-such feature

Short answer: Wait 'til you're older.

Shorter answer: No.

Long answer: Maybe someday, but not right now. We don't have the time.

The softlink gradient colors are broken.

I know. It can be fixed [Ed. note: We think it is now fixed. Bugs to kthejoker] but the fix would involve applying your color preferences to all themes (thanks to a cool nately feature of the Everything Engine which I didn't even know about when I did ekw Preferences). That would be pretty cool, actually. The problem is that it would (I think) require some changes in other themes and in assorted code elsewhere. Or maybe not. It doesn't seem practical to do it halfway. So, it's a lot of work and I haven't gotten to it yet. I'm leery of making changes to code that's in use unless I've got a lot of time to mess around with it. Either way, user accounts of ekw users would have to be "upgraded" so as not to lose their settings, and that's a hassle.

The short-term solution is to turn off the softlink gradients in Preferences, if you find that softlinks are unreadable.

Why can't I change the color of the odd-numbered rows in the New Writeups?

This problem has been fixed: See "Odd Row Color" in ekw Preferences.

Odd table rows in newwriteups now have 'class="oddrow"' in addition to the color attribute. On at least some browsers (not including Opera 5.12 on Windows), the CSS has precedence over the color attribute (we worked around the Opera problem by putting the class attribute in the <td> tag, while the color attribute is in the <tr> tag). Any theme can now take advantage of this (and the "Classic" theme variations do). I've been adding the same attribute to the odd numbered rows in other tables.

The "Odd Row Color" is currently used in several places, with more to come:

• Username rows in New Writeups.
• Property name rows in user display pages (via htmlcode displayUserInfo, which all the user display pages use).
• Comment headers on debate comments. At the moment, this is meaningful only if you're an editor or god.
• Everything User Search (This will not work in Opera 5: To make a long story short, the Opera workaround would add 5k to each page load, which is excessive. We apologise).
• ENN, Everything New Nodes, and the other one, whatever it's called. (If you're hep to the jive, they all use the same htmlcode.)
• reallycool nodelet (a.k.a. "Cream of the Cool" on the front page), for the writeup titlebar things.
• weblog htmlcode: Mainly, this means the "news" on the front page, but also other stuff here and there.

Why isn't the E2 logo a link to the front page?

It is now, at long last. If the text in the logo is underlined or if it's the wrong color, let us know (incl. browser and platform) and we'll see what we can see.

Thanks to gusnz for pointing out how to do this. Thanks to Simpleton for coming up with a cool workaround while we were trying to figure this one out, and also to yerricde for helping make the workaround work right with IE.

The font face and size settings in ekw Preferences don't work.

You may not remember who Johnny Carson was, but I'll put on my Carnac the Magnificent hat anyway and guess that you're using Netscape 4 or 6 (or Mozilla) on Linux, or else OmniWeb on MacOS X. This is a "known issue" with those browsers on those platforms, which is a pseudo-tactful way of saying I know about it but I haven't a clue what causes it, nor how to fix it. I wish I had a better answer.