Skip to main content

Frequently Asked Questions

* (Questions may or may not have been asked, let alone “frequently”)

Q. Must I include a transcript for every strip?

A. No, you don’t have to include any transcripts. You can absolutely build a Springheel site without a single one. But it’s still highly recommended. Without any searchable plain text for your comics:

  • You’ll take a huge hit to accessibility and SEO.

  • Readers will have a harder time looking up words or phrases they don’t know.

  • People looking for a specific strip based on a piece of remembered dialogue will have to just give up and hate you forever.

Q. I’m on a Mac and…

A. I don’t use Apple products, so I can’t really provide support or troubleshooting for them. Sorry.

Q. How do I fix the encoding errors when I run Springheel through the Windows command line?

A. I’ve done my best to mitigate this, but it is a problem with some older versions of Windows that I can’t really control. Look up how to enable Unicode in the command line for your version of Windows, and that should fix it. (Updating Python may also help.)

Q. The date format you use is weird!

A. That’s not a question! But Springheel’s date format – a four-digit year, two-digit month, and two-digit day, in that order – follows the ISO 8601 specification for date display. I happen to personally like this format, but that’s quite aside from the fact that it is the official, internationally-recognized, unambiguous standard. (See also XKCD’s take on the matter.)

Q. Why is the text so big?

It’s more like other sites’ text is too small. I’m very nearsighted, so I designed the Springheel themes to display text at a size I could personally read easily.

Q. Why doesn’t Springheel keep track of the time a comic was published, instead of just the date?

A. No matter what, there is going to be a gap between the listed time and the time when it was uploaded to the server. I didn’t want to pretend a degree of accuracy and precision that wasn’t actually there.

Q. Can you recommend a good web host?

A. I’m not too familiar with free hosting if that’s what you’re after. But if you do have a hosting budget and are technically adept, I highly recommend NearlyFreeSpeech – their pricing is very reasonable, their service is consistent (pretty much no downtime in my experience), and they offer many useful services for the privacy-conscious.

Q. Why don’t the navigation arrows come with hovered versions?

A. The conventional method for adding image hover effects is inflexible, crufty, non-semantic, and inaccessible (c.f. Notes on accessible CSS image sprites), and icon fonts are even worse (c.f. Icon font accessibility, Ten reasons we switched from an icon font to SVG, CSS generated content is not content). If there is a semantic, pure HTML+CSS solution that allows for alt text, without setting a million exact px values or creating empty non-semantic elements, I’m all ears.

At the very least, the “note”, “seasonal”, and “elemental” themes’ arrows change color on hover.

Q. Why doesn’t Springheel use JavaScript? If you used JS you could do <blah blah>…

A. JavaScript is overused and often unnecessary. There is nothing wrong with plain old HTML (especially for static text and images, as Springheel sites mostly are), and anyone who tries to convince you that “it’s $year, your site MUST have the flavor of the month!” is selling something.

JavaScript also poses numerous security hazards and even copyright problems. Excessive JavaScript simply to make things “nicer” often blocks readers with less CPU power, like those on mobile devices or older computers, from even being able to view the site at all. And sometimes JavaScript interferes with other controls – a script on a particular newspaper site completely blocks all keyboard navigation (no Page Up/Down, space, arrow keys, etc.), which is catastrophic for assistive technology users! I wanted vanilla Springheel sites to be perfectly usable even with JavaScript turned completely off.

If there’s some specific thing you want to do (as in the examples of “extending Springheel” above) that JavaScript can solve, then feel free to use it. Just please do a minimum amount of testing to make sure you aren’t breaking some existing part of the browser.

Q. Does the “note” theme follow Material Design guidelines?

  1. Nope!