Mandaris

JavaScript is the fastest way to build yourself a slow website.

– Harry Roberts

I told myself I would not get into JavaScript optimization.

Tuesday, I released a post with and version bump of Labarum. I then went on and recorded a podcast stating that theme was now “feature complete”.

Well, I was wrong.

I went to the Homebrew Website Club to do some socializing and shared my site with the others. I pride myself on having a site that is pretty accessible. Turns out that the color contrast on my links isn’t good enough. I knew I had tested the basic font, but had misattributed the links not passing the contrast test as an issue with the test itself.

Definitely, I needed an intervention.

So, I spent about an hour going through all the accessibility issues and HTML validation errors. Some of them I can’t change at this time because the code is generated by Hugo/Goldmark. For example, if you have multiple articles on a page (index or list) and they each have a set of footnotes or use a table of contents, you will get an error about them using the same ids for those items.

I’m not going to put the time or energy into that.

Other issues such as a warning about using a trailing slash in the HTML did make me pause for a moment. For example the following from site-head.html:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />

And

<img 
  src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/661/2023/children-who-are-wrong.jpg" 
  alt="Principal Skinner thinks the children  are wrong"
  title="Self Reflection can be hard."/>

I decided to keep examples like these and ignore the issue for now.

Other accessible issues that I’m not going to put more energy into at this point are the code blocks. Some of the contrast colors for keywords were flagged, and the tabindex="0" can make keyboard navigation more difficult than it needs to be.

The most egregious issue is that I use the colors in the headers and links at the very top of the page. I’ve since changed it in both light and dark mode to be something closer to the basic font color but still within the Nord color scheme.

Since I’m changing the colors, I’ll have to redo the images that I have in the README.md which will probably make me think of other things to change. I’m both dreading and excited by doing that as I’ve learned more about what makes for a good demonstration of Labarum.

What is the next opportunity for Labarum?

My favorite part about this post and this point release is that I’m writing about what I’m not going to do.

Sure, there are places that the theme needs improvement¹, but I have never been more confident and happy with where it is. I looked at the git history and the first commit was February 21st, 2022. That’s a significant amount of time.

I want to spend more time putting stuff on the blog and less time on what it looks like.

There are going to be changes in the future.

But at this point, it will be focused on changes that are related to the content that I’m creating.

AMERICAN FICTION is Cord Jefferson's hilarious directorial debut, which confronts our culture’s obsession with reducing people to outrageous stereotypes. Jeffrey Wright stars as Monk, a frustrated novelist who’s fed up with the establishment profiting from “Black” entertainment that relies on tired and offensive tropes. To prove his point, Monk uses a pen name to write an outlandish “Black” book of his own, a book that propels him to the heart of hypocrisy and the madness he claims to disdain.

This looks really interesting to me. I've seen other films and shows use similar concepts and stories, but it will be nice to see how it is executed.

Recorded on Tuesday, October 17th.

Topics for the podcast

• Getting help
  • It’s ok to get help
  • You are not alone
• Working on my website
  • Mermaid
  • Is the project feature complete?
• In search of the perfect profile picture
• Using Tinylytics (https://tinylytics.app)

One of the changes that version .117 of Hugo that has been allowed onto Micro.blog is the ability to use diagrams in your markdown. The documentation on diagrams highlights two different kinds of diagrams that you can include; GoAT and Mermaid.

When you make a diagram using GoAT, Hugo translates this into a SVG on the server side and then delivers it with the HTML for that particular post. You can find some really complicated examples of them on the GitHub page for GoAT and I’ve included one below to demonstrate.

Mermaid is a diagramming and charting tool that uses javascript and will load different libraries as needed to create the final product. I believe that it can be used to make static deliverables that you could save, but -according to my understanding- that’s a separate module and outside what Micro.blog and most installations require.

In addition, Hugo does not include the connections to Mermaid, and it’s up to the theme developers to make sure this works.

When you get it working, you can have diagrams like the one below.

sequenceDiagram
    participant Alice
    participant Bob
    Alice->>John: Hello John, how are you?
    loop Healthcheck
        John->>John: Fight against hypochondria
    end
    Note right of John: Rational thoughts 
prevail!
    John-->>Alice: Great!
    John->>Bob: How about you?
    Bob-->>John: Jolly good!

The Mystery of the Mermaid

I had to ask myself why am I putting the time into getting this feature working in my theme. At first glance, the goals of accessibility and speed do not seem to align with adding diagrams built with third party JavaScript framework. I’ve run this site for years and have used tools to create static images that I serve with alt text to illustrate my point.

Ultimately, it’s because I love DIAGRAMS!

I like being able to have a picture that goes with my posts. I don’t feel that I will be using a lot of these, but I want to help those who do.

And with all of my labarum posts, feel free to take what you want to make your themes better.

Splashing around with the Mermaid

I want to start off this section by stating that a lot of what I’m going to write about is duplication of the documentation found online. This is me documenting my process of applying it and my thought process at the time.

My first stop on implementing this is to open up a browser window to duckduckgo and then opening the first 3-5 search results of Hugo mermaid diagram from DuckDuckGo before reading the Hugo Mermaid documentation. I do this to get a feel of what developer roadblocks and experiences that I can note before reading the documentation. It’s similar to where I would read the discussion questions the teacher gives for assigned reading back in school.

The step of creating the layouts/_default/_markup/render-codeblock-mermaid.html is straight forward¹.

<pre class="mermaid">
{{ .Inner | safeHTML }}
</pre>
{{ .Page.Store.Set "hasMermaid" true }}

The first line will go to the resultant HTML, and mermaid will look for items that have the mermaid class to get instructions on what kind of image needs to create.

The second line passes whatever was in the code block. This is typically the definition of the diagram but if you are more familiar or more adventurous you can pass mermaid directives or configurations as well.

The next step is to add something similar to the template.

{{ if .Page.Store.Get "hasMermaid" }}
  <script type="module">
  import mermaid from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mermaid/dist/mermaid.esm.min.mjs'; 
  mermaid.initialize({ startOnLoad: true });
  </script>
{{ end }}

I wasn’t sure why this needed to go on the actual page versus on the footer that would be used on every single page of the website. Most of the examples that I looked at had it on the single.html and this worked for individual pages but not for the index.html.

I placed it in article_footer.html until I get a deeper understanding of how Hugo wants to manage a flag that would toggle the loading of JavaScript.

Luckily, the browsers that I tested with only load the JavaScript once. I’m not a JavaScript expert, but I think multiple loads of the 7k line file might be frowned upon.

Colors of the Mermaid

After I got it working for the index and standalone pages, I tested the diagram with the dark mode of the theme. Unfortunately, the default text color does not work in all situations.

I checked the documentation on theming the diagrams and saw that I can change the theme by giving it as a parameter during the initialization of mermaid.

mermaid.initialize( { startOnLoad: true, theme: 'dark' });

This allows for the diagrams to look good in dark mode.

This looked good in dark mode but not light mode.

I then experimented with changing the background for div.mermaid and then having the diagrams render using the default theme for both light and dark mode.

Good but not ultimately it just didn’t look good enough. I showed it to my wife and some people in a discord and they agreed as well.

I needed to find a way to make it toggle from default and dark.

Searching for the Key

Luckily, when I did my first third group of searches, I came across a Hugo forum thread on the “Correct way to embed Mermaid.JS”². And it had a link to this article to add Mermaid to Hugo with Dark Mode which is very informative.

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{{- if .Page.Store.Get "hasMermaid" }}
<script type="module">
  import mermaid from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/mermaid/dist/mermaid.esm.min.mjs';
  let isDark = window.matchMedia('(prefers-color-scheme: dark)').matches;
  let mermaidTheme = (isDark) ? 'dark' : 'default';
  let mermaidConfig = {
    theme: mermaidTheme,
    startOnLoad: true }
  mermaid.initialize(mermaidConfig);
</script>
{{ end }}

On line 4, we set a property based on the weather the browser is in dark mode.

Line 5 is a ternary statement that chooses between the dark or default themes.

Line 6 is the beginning of a JavaScript Object. I feel that the way it’s in the theme will make it easier to maintain and extend in the future.

It’s all about that base

Mermaid does have a base theme that allows for you to define the colors for the diagram. Yes, I could have taken the time to learn how to pull colors from the theme or use the toggle from light and dark mode to set the diagram colors. But, that could be a long process to customize something that I may not use.

If you want to take this theme and approach, please do, and please have no hesitation to send me a link of your endeavors.

Limitations

Although this implementation does consider if the user is in light or dark mode, it does not switch dynamically. If you are on a system that changes the theme depending on time, you will have to reload to get the different theme. There are themes and walk throughs that show how to do this, but I feel that this iteration and my skill level are not at the appropriate level to implement it now.

Another limitation is that the diagram definition might find it’s way into the .Summary for the individual post.

Mermaid Treasure

Thank you for getting this far into my post. Here are some resources if you want to know more about Mermaid.js.

Accessibility Options

If you took the time to make the diagram, take a little more time to allow other people to get something from it.

Tutorials

Lots of examples on how to make diagrams

Live Editor

A quick way to make and test your diagrams before putting them in your posts.

What’s next for Labarum?

I need to do an accessibility and validation audit of the theme. I’ve been making some adjustments and haven’t been testing to make sure that the site is as accessible as I had originally intended.

I’ve been anticipating the Gen V series for months. I really enjoy things that are created in the TV universe of “The Boys” and its take on the superhero genre. It pleases both the part of me that enjoyed the over the top violence of 80s and 90s action movies with the part of me that wants a little more depth to the characters in a show.

The season really starts off with a bang that I was afraid would cause my wife to stop watching. But it’s important. Important to the characters involved and important to the viewer to be reminded that things like this happens more often than anyone admits in The Boys universe.

A lot of things happen.

If anything, it might be considered a negative that so many things happen. Gen V premiered with three (3) episodes on the first night. This season has 8 episodes total and after watching the fourth, I’m afraid to say goodbye to these characters that I’m just getting to know.

The important thing is that I want to know these people. At first glance, they do come off as 20 something archetypes that you would see in a show like Dawson’s Creek or Pretty Little Liars. Full disclosure, I don’t typically watch those shows, but the issues of eating disorders, personal identity, and more are prominent in the show. I applaud the show for bringing these up and understand that they can’t go into too much depth with them as we move along with the plot.

And what about the plot? It’s pretty good. We’re halfway through the season as I write this and I’m going to be sad that it’s going to end.

tl;dr the brand new State of HTML survey is finally open!

I think we should all check this out because it feels like the major browsers have been doing a lot of changes recently.

It not “bad movie”, but it certainly is not a good movie. I saw it because I was curious and I wanted to watch something that I wouldn’t mind being interrupted while watching. 

Toward the end, I was kind of hoping for it to end. 

Ultimately, it feels like a movie that was trying really, really hard for you to like it. The main protagonist is a combination of Superman’s powers with a 90’s moody Batman who kills. You don’t get much of a reason to root for him until much later in the film and at that point it was too late.

It not “bad movie”, but it certainly is not a good movie. I saw it because I was curious and I wanted to watch something that I wouldn’t mind being interrupted while watching. 

Toward the end, I was kind of hoping for it to end. 

Ultimately, it feels like a movie that was trying really, really hard for you to like it. The main protagonist is a combination of Superman’s powers with a 90’s moody Batman who kills. You don’t get much of a reason to root for him until much later in the film and at that point it was too late.

"Turn Tables" by Peter Alfred Hess is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

I’m rolling out another update to my theme for Micro.blog. It took a lot of time and effort on my part. It definitely reminds me of the story about how people paint both the front and back of a fence. I don’t think most will know or use some of the things that I put into this. If you do use or learn anything from this, I would really appreciate you sending me a message.

I’ve been doing small tweaks to the theme for the last couple of weeks as I learn more and more about CSS. I had even posted about how I had started working through the material found in Kevin Powell’s Conquering Responsive Layouts course and got a couple of responses that pointed me to further research.

There are plenty of miscellaneous changes that I put in related to accessibility and edge cases for HTML elements.

Back on the (code) block

I’ve been working on code blocks for a while. I don’t think there are many blogs on micro.blog that feature code as a regular part of what they publish. It’s very important to me that as someone who is writing about the code of the theme that it can be read.

It haunts me.

I was ok with the fact that the code blocks worked well with Hugo version .91 but, with the availability of .177, I couldn’t ignore the problems that I saw.

Here is a picture of what I’m referring to from my post celebrating the announcement.

The underlining issue is that the default properties for the theme and Hugo is to place the styling inline of the HTML. AND, that I’ve opted to use display: inline-block for the <div> that is the container for my blog posts.

To better explain the issue, I’ll use the following snippet found in the Hugo documentation about code fences and put it in one of my posts, I’d get different results based on the version of Hugo that I’m running.

```go {linenos=table,hl_lines=[1,11,"15-16"],linenostart=199, anchorlinenos=true, lineanchors=small }
// GetTitleFunc returns a func that can be used to transform a string to
// title case.
//
// The supported styles are
//
// - "Go" (strings.Title)
// - "AP" (see https://www.apstylebook.com/)
// - "Chicago" (see https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html)
//
// If an unknown or empty style is provided, AP style is what you get.
func GetTitleFunc(style string) func(s string) string {
  switch strings.ToLower(style) {
  case "go":
    return strings.Title
  case "chicago":
    return transform.NewTitleConverter(transform.ChicagoStyle)
  default:
    return transform.NewTitleConverter(transform.APStyle)
  }
}
```

Hugo will render this as a series of nested spans in a table in a couple of divs. For example, the span that contains the line number would be div.highlight > div > table > tr > td:first-of-type > pre > code > span.

Each level of this structure may have its own inline styling.

Going back to the code snippet, with version .91, I would get the following output for the highlighted line 213 (the one that with ‘case “go”’). I changed the spacing for legibility.

<span style="display:block;width:100%;background-color:#3c3d38">
  <span style="margin-right:0.4em;padding:0 0.4em 0 0.4em;color:#7f7f7f">
    213
  </span>
</span>

With version .117, you would get the following output for the same line.

<span style="background-color:#3c3d38">
  <span style="white-space:pre;-webkit-user-select:none;user-select:none;margin-right:0.4em;padding:0 0.4em 0 0.4em;color:#7f7f7f" id="big-213">
    <a style="outline:none;text-decoration:none;color:inherit" href="#big-213">
      213
    </a>
  </span>
</span>

Note that this version allows use to set anchors for the individual lines as well as a prefix.

At this point, I realized that I needed to have a better way of controlling the behavior of the different elements. Luckily, the documentation for Hugo Highlighting configuration has a noClasses flag that we can set in the config.json of the theme.

{
    "params": {
        "showTableOfContents": false,
        "showAuthorInfo": false,
        "showDebugInfo": false
    },
    "markup": {
    	"highlight": {
    		"noClasses": false
    	}
    }
}

With the noClasses set to false¹, the line that we’ve been looking at gets rendered to something like below.

The example is legible without the color and inline formatting.

To put the color back into the example, we refer to the documentation on how to generate syntax highlighter CSS to get the colors. I used the example that they provided so that I could compare it to the defaults.

hugo gen chromastyles --style=monokai > syntax.css

Then we add the newly created css file to our site-head.html to represent that syntax color is important but that the style.css is the final say for customization from the theme.

Unfortunately, the lines to do not … um… line up and the colors don’t match up with what we’re expecting.

After some experimenting with Firefox developer tools, I added the following to the style.css to get the lines to match.

.chroma {
  overflow-x: auto;
}

.chroma .lnt {
  display: flex;
}

.chroma .hl {
  display: flex;
}

The color for the highlight appears to be incorrect for all the styles that I tested, so I went back to an earlier version of Hugo to get the color and then placed it in the style.css as well.

.chroma .hl {
    background-color: #3c3d38;
    display: flex;
}

I also created a bug report about Chroma styles for line highlighting are not using the correct color.

As the last step, we remove the box-shadow from the links in the table.

.lnlinks, .lnlinks:hover {
    box-shadow: none;
}

The results of the highlight experiments

So the following is what the code looks like afterward.

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// GetTitleFunc returns a func that can be used to transform a string to
// title case.
//
// The supported styles are
//
// - "Go" (strings.Title)
// - "AP" (see https://www.apstylebook.com/)
// - "Chicago" (see https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html)
//
// If an unknown or empty style is provided, AP style is what you get.
func GetTitleFunc(style string) func(s string) string {
  switch strings.ToLower(style) {
  case "go":
    return strings.Title
  case "chicago":
    return transform.NewTitleConverter(transform.ChicagoStyle)
  default:
    return transform.NewTitleConverter(transform.APStyle)
  }
}

You can also link directly to lines (for example, line 213) and it should work. It also scrolls side to side to accommodate the longer lines.

Showing the table of contents

When I get frustrated with code blocks, I look at other aspects of the theme and what’s available in Hugo and Micro.blog. Hugo offers built in table of content short code that can be used in the themes. You can read more about it in the online documentation.

My first idea was that I wanted to have a property that users could turn on to automatically add the table of contents to a post. I came across this feature in the Cards Theme for Micro.blog and thought that it would be a nice feature for those who write a long post.

I create _partial\toc.html with the following code that I would put above the <div> that that contains the contents of an individual post.

<aside class="[ TableOfContents ] [ style-box-alt ]">
  <h2 class="[ TableOfContentsHeader ] [ text-center ]">Table of Contents</h2>
  {{ .Page.TableOfContents }}
</aside>

This would render as an empty box if there were no headers in a post. After a lot of experimenting, I came up with the following.

.TableOfContents {
  display: none;
  margin: 0 auto;
  width: 90%;
}

.TableOfContents:has(ul) {
  display: block;
  float:right;
  margin-left: 1em;
  margin-right: 1em;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
  padding-right: 1em;
}

Line 2 makes the default state of the table of contents hidden and then line 7 checks to see if Hugo has rendered a <ul> within whatever is in the .TableOfContents class. If it’s true, then line 8 will set the display type to a block; making it visible.

Problem Opportunity

Unfortunately, I ran into a number of issues.

1. It does not take into account older posts that already have table of contents
   Most of my posts about labarum have headers and I do not want to go back and edit all of them. Some users might only want a table of contents that they specify themselves.
2. It obscures posts that start off with a big “hero” image
   I have a couple of posts like this and the floating of the table of contents did not look correct. I will have to come back to this when I’m a little better with CSS.
3. This technique does not currently work with Firefox
   The table of contents does not show up on Firefox. I tried experimenting with different logic to toggle the visibility, but ultimately, I couldn’t get it working. I don’t know how many people are using this theme or how many people come to my site using Firefox, but I really, really want people to be able to read this. NOTE: I wrote this on August 20th, and then the Firefox nightly build enabled the :has flag in build 119. Meaning that this will work soon.

I decided to remove the property and make two different shortcodes for table of contents.

The first one is activated by adding {{ toc }} to your text and will float in the center of the article.

The second one is activated by adding {{ floating-toc }} to your text and will float in the right of the article.

Please note that if you place the short codes at the beginning of the post, it will be part of the .summary.

A Standard Head

A while ago, Sven (@sod), mentioned a couple of people on Micro.blog about abstracting some of the code that is used in all Micro.blog themes. The discussion and pull request was on github and it can now be seen in the micro.blog theme-blank.

You can test it out on your local environment by cloning it and placing it with the other themes.

After you’ve cloned the theme, you edit your config.json to something similar to what is below.

"theme": ["labarum", "theme-blank"]

I then edited the partial\site-head.html to have the following:

{{ "<!-- Microblog header begin-->" | safeHTML }}
{{ partial "microblog_head.html" . }}
{{ "<!-- Microblog header end -->" | safeHTML }}

Here is a direct link to the microblog_head.html partial if you want to read over it.

What’s next?

There were a couple of things that I wanted to add to this release but realized that I was stopping progress. In my last two posts about labarum, I told myself that I wouldn’t wait for perfection to happen.

That being said, here are the things that I have on the roadmap for my next release.

Show the Profile Picture

A couple of the other themes on Micro.blog use the profile picture on the site. I do load this picture in the metadata of the theme’s head and articles but an end user doesn’t see that. Part of this is just me not wanting to show my face and not having it in my initial design for the theme.

Enable Mermaid Diagrams

Hugo natively allows for GoAT diagrams² which are rendereded as SVGs on the site. To enable mermaid, you have to place something in the theme. I’ll be experimenting with and hopefully find a way so that it doesn’t load the associated javascript library if a user doesn’t want to use it.

Reevaluate OpenGraph and other meta tags

There was a pull request and discussion about abstracting the metadata and placing it in “theme-blank”. I currently do this myself and wrote a post about my journey.

I’ll have to read more. I like the idea of having a standard, but I vaguely remember something about why I made the decisions that I did.

CSS responsiveness

Working with my theme makes me appreciate other web developers. Unfortunately, I start comparing my work to others, and comparison is the thief of joy. I’m not happy with a part of the theme that I have. It has to do with how it looks on smaller screens.

Nothing is “wrong” with this, but for some reason, it “does not spark joy”.

I’ll have to take a couple steps back and think about what I want from this.

Break time!

Thank you for getting to the bottom of this article. I certainly hope that you got something out of it.

Please contact me if you have any positive comments or questions!