2. History and Motivation

2. History and Motivation
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S2 (Style System 2) is the follow-up to LiveJournal's original templating engine, now referred to as "S1". S1 allowed people who knew HTML to somewhat easily re-style their journal but had a number of shortcomings:

The four views (recent ("lastn"), friends, calendar, and day) all had to be created independently and couldn't share any code. So if you wanted to make a new style you had to do it four times. The tediousness of this made us reluctant to add any more views to the system (such as a month view or single item/comments view).
- Styles weren't easily customizable, and thus not well-suited for the majority of users. While there existed the idea of "color themes", they were ill-designed in that it was assumed any color theme should be able to plug into any style. The available colors to set (by the themes) and use (by the styles) were named things like background", "foreground", "weak accent", "text on weak accent", "strong accent", etc. Unfortunately, no color theme worked well with every layout and no layout worked well with all color theme. In S2, color themes are specific to the layout.
- Colors were the only things that were easily customizable. Other options required editing HTML or doing CSS, both things which the average user neither knows nor should know.
S1 didn't give style authors much flexibility, since it didn't offer any way to do conditional output. Instead, the system itself has to anticipate author needs and conditionally populate and provide certain template blocks, depending on whether there's, say, an entry subject or not. S2, on the other hand, is a full programming langauge, so authors can do whatever they want.

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