magistrate

On Friday I'm shipping out for Wiscon!

If you want to identify me, I look like this:



I'm generally amenable to meeting new people, though I may stare at you for a while and attempt to place where I know you from, even if I don't. There's also a pretty good chance I'll foist a MOO Minicard on you, if you're out collecting minicards from everyone who's ever appeared in Fantasy Magazine or everyone whose name starts with a vowel and is not a palindrome, or something.

LiveJournal, for reasons known only to them, has begun stripping out any inline styles written into a tag using the style="" attribute.

This one really has me frothing at the mouth, partly because the RP I'm in (and have been for the better part of three years has always been a place to explore a lot of different modes of storytelling, and those modes extend to things like hiding easter eggs (links and whitetext) in the tags, playing with formatting to represent the mental state of characters, coding certain types of psychic activity to certain colors... even things as simple as letting a character scribble out what they've written. Basically, we've enjoyed playing with hypertext as a medium. The internet makes something that's only beginning to show its head in traditional literature (see, for example: House of Leaves) accessible, and it's been a great deal of fun channelling our assembled creativity into this.

Now, that's rendered impossible. Worse, the work we've already done has also been stripped of its styling. In some cases, the tags have degraded gracefully. In others, they've been rendered almost unreadable.

I've set up a side-by-side comparison of the styled and unstyled tags here: http://adravet.net/misc/btr_misc/stripped_css.html, and I've started a support ticket here: http://www.livejournal.com/support/see_request.bml?id=1173954& as well as brought it up on a news post here: http://news.livejournal.com/130727.html?thread=91337895 .

I hope that this is a bug; or, if it was a deliberate choice on the part of the developers, that they can be persuaded to reverse it. For a service which advertises itself as a place to express yourself, this is a very disheartening occurrence.