i decided to merge my additions and modifications in the helmaville branch with the main branch. here's a short list of changes i implemented so far:

1. storylist macro
2. custom clipping in renderTextPreview
3. the title property of stories and comments is kept along with its corresponding value in the xml content
4. new doctype / document header in page.skin for xhtml conformance
5. created a new createtime_macro() function in the hopobject prototype and removed it from at least four specific prototypes.
6. shortcuts (improved but still experimental)

moreover, i am currently going through this list and strike out feature by feature (as far as i feel able to implement it):

1. changed explicit and verbose date format parameter to "short" in comment skins
2. default title in new comment ("Re: previous title"; experimental)
3. extended the topic macro to support generation of topic icons, links or simple plain output of the topic's name

i hope i did not forget anything... (and that everything works and nothing else is broken)

cool! works nice, thanks tobi!

I thought they were merged already ;-)

i would rather like to see this "feature" removed again.

with this "feature" enabled the title of this comment would have been "RE: update" most likely, which is far worse (imho) than a custom title describing the content of the comment or even than no title at all.

i could imagine that with these default titles enabled most commenters would not take the few seconds to reason about a more useful title.