Platform: Website
I want to make a post something like this - https://codepen.io/prowebsitecrafter/pen/wBWOgpK
The problem is that iNat does not accept style tags for formatting things like that. I were trying to work on an interactive key with my template but it failed due to incompatibility of a tag. I know many others would love to style their post like this and make things a bit more out of the ordinary.
HTML style tags introduce arbitrary blocks of CSS, which could let a single comment or journal post (not sure which you’re referring to here) completely change the appearance and content of the page they appear on. As such they are never going to be allowed on inat (edit to clarify: that is my prediction, I don’t speak for inat). However there are many free options for hosting simple HTML documents online, most of which will require a bit more technical know-how but would give you complete control over the content & display. Github pages is one popular such service.
Honestly I must say that yes it is possible for people to misuse this. But just as iNat staff suspend people causing too much trouble this can also be inspected and then we can have such people understand hopefully.
there’s nothing that prevents you from adding styling in your HTML elements. it’s a little more work adding this to each element, but it doesn’t look like you’re doing anything that is so complex that it would take that much extra work.
I strongly oppose letting people add a style tag. People could really screw up the site appearance, such as making all content on the page not visible.
<style>
* {display: none !important }
</style>
Adding style tag is especially bad in the age of AI-generated vibe coding when people can easily copy and paste code with no idea what the code does. Last thing the iNat devs need is to debug a page because a user’s CSS messes up the content of page.
This gets confusing… people can misuse it so maybe we will add it only for posts and not for comments?
the sort of thing you’re asking for will never be allowed in any form. CSS can do more than simply style your page. in some ways, it can be considered a Turing complete language. just before you started this thread, Google even announced that they had a zero day exploit in Chrome that allowed folks to execute arbitrary code using malicious CSS.
(by the way – if you don’t know whether your Chrome-based browser has been updated since the fix was released, you should check now and update it manually, if needed, since the zero-day is known to be actively exploited in the wild.)
as i noted before, if you want to style particular elements, you can still do that. just do that. ex.: <div style="width:100%"></div>
Style tag in post is a bad idea. People can use style to hide iNat’s header, footer, navigation, etc. and make a post that looks like this.
I’m going to set this request to close tomorrow, as it’s not something we’ll do.
I feel like style tags could be allowed, but there would need to be limits. Maybe something like don’t allow styling of elements outside the post or something. Maybe style tags could be allowed only in iframes.
I think that this is very much agreeable. In fact this is what I were talking of.
I strongly oppose allowing users to add iframes. Allowing users to add iframe is a worse idea than allowing style tags. There are huge security risks involving iframes. Scammers and hackers use iframes to steal credentials, install malware, etc. Search the web for “iframe” and “security” to learn more.
@cyanfox @aaravmishra I know you two aren’t trying to harm iNaturalist or the iNat users, but the suggestions you two propose can create big security risks to iNaturalist and iNat users.
I did not support iframes though, and I wonder why would someone need them.
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