I kill DSpace now
Right, so I start digging into the interior pages in DSpace, because something in there is making all the type in tables, like, two pixels tall in Safari… and I come across the Browse By Titles page.
That page in a default DSpace install is a table. (Everything in a default DSpace install is a table. If DSpace were a furniture store, good luck finding a chair or a mattress or a lamp. Tables. All tables.) Moreover, it’s a deathly stupid table, because the attribute that the site user has chosen as being salient—namely, the title—isn’t first in the table, and isn’t distinguished in any way typographically except by a bolded column header.
(What’s first? Date. Date? Who the hell cares about the date something was added to the repository, I ask you? Sure, it’s a great thing to sort by, but nobody cares about actually seeing it. Librarians and visible metadata. Sometimes I just want to strangle my own kind, which is sad.)
It’s even worse in the current state of my redesign, because I’ve gotten rid of the table colors. So, okay, I think to myself, time to put the sweat of my brow where my mouth is and redo this in a typographically sensible fashion.
Except. I. Can’t.
They HARD-CODED the table INTO THE JAVA LIBRARIES. Not into a JSP. There’s an entire fricking CLASS in the source code that ONLY EXISTS to write out that stupid bloody useless table.
Well. Looks like I’ll be messing with Java a lot sooner than I meant to. War has been declared. That table is history. History, do you hear me?
I am tempted to file a bug report pointing out that one can’t change all the HTML from the JSPs. To me, that’s a bug—and it ought to be to them, too, because the HTML that lives in the Java suffers from all the markup badness that the rest of DSpace is rife with.
Eh, well. Job security, I suppose. I’d rather have clean markup out of the box, though, and spend my time on other things.