On the negative side, gluing the local program back together took a lot more work than I expected at the start. On the slightly more positive side, apparently the old version was quietly broken too and I just didn't notice. Yay for actually testing things.

(In theory I could have done some of my stuff with local CSS hacks but in practice I'm building from source anyway so I already have a chainsaw running.)

I impulsively updated my home Fedora desktop to Fedora 43 this evening and the old old version of the program (Liferea) broke, which makes me unhappy because I liked the old UI better than the current one. On the other hand the old (old) version was very old in the tooth by now and being up to date is probably good for me.

I am going to be hacking the new UI, though (which, as usual, is HTML + CSS under the hood).

I don't understand what exactly is going on with Liferea's HTML and CSS rendering of items¹ in its Gtk 3 UI. But not to worry, soon enough all of it will get replaced with a Gtk 4 UI that no doubt will have its own problems.

¹ well, one answer is "horrors best not contemplated", since items are rendered with a combination of XML/HTML templates and JavaScript to fill in the templates using Handlebars. Yes, this is my face.

Update: it helps to understand Liferea's HTML and CSS¹ if you keep the CSS distinction between 'id=' and 'class=' straight in your head, and don't use the CSS syntax for the wrong one. Also, ' ' is different from '.' in CSS selectors, that's also helpful to keep track of.

¹ well it helps with any HTML, but here Liferea is what mattered.