Comments on: When Readers Choose to Use Their Own Style

By: Kenneth Sundqvist

Kenneth Sundqvist — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 09:30:40 +0000

I use userstyles on a site-by-site basis too. using the Fx extension Stylish it is very easy to add styles to specific domains or URLs (like a.com, b.a.com, (b.)a.com/c).

Stylish is like greasemonkey for CSS jockeys without JS knowledge.

Something that I also do is to alter sites temporarily with FireBug, because it’s so easy to inspect and alter the HTML and CSS. For example if I’m reading an article and I want the text size bigger, but the column becomes to narrow, I just open FireBug for a few seconds and it’s perfect for reading. And if it’s a site that I visit a lot I do the same thing but with Stylish.

I’m missing Fx support for the :nth pseudo-classes and such though because applying userstyles to sites with horrible HTML would be infinitely easier with them.

I strongly recommend that you give Stylish a try (if you use Fx) and userstyles in general. When something bothers you just pop open FireBug and see if it’s a quick fix. It’s such a relief to know that you don’t have to read that stupid 11px #aaa text, and that you don’t have to look at a completely broken layout when you try to scale the text up.

Cheers!

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 23:08:58 +0000

@NatalieMac: I can absolutely sympathize with that, another use of user styles that hadn’t crossed my mind.

@Megan: You give some good tips too — maybe I’m missing out by not using user style sheets more often. Using them for print is a fantastic idea. There is a fantastic amount of awful markup out there — luckily things are getting better.

@Odin Omdal Hørthe: Yes, you and Megan both mentioned Opera in that it can do a lot with user CSS, it is quite a powerful browser. It’s interesting to hear that someone you know chooses to force all links to be blue…

@Ollie: It’s good to learn that people truly do use user style sheets, but it’s true — in order to really take advantage of the opportunity, having a strong knowledge of CSS is very helpful.

By: Ollie

Ollie — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 20:38:54 +0000

Like Megan, I have several user stylesheets in use, mostly to prettify some bad looking sites. They range from simply shifting the BBC’s fixed-width pages into the centre of the screen, to a complete design for one of my favourite phpbb boards (their theme is pretty ugly!).

It’s really useful to have the tools and knowledge to actually fix many of the gripes I have about certain websites.

By: Odin Omdal Hørthe

Odin Omdal Hørthe — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 06:30:48 +0000

Yes. I was supposed to tell you about the userstyles in Opera. You can use a userstyle to get a textbrowser, – or an C64 or just better contrast et al. You should try looking at these inside Opera if you’ve got it on your harddrive.

Cool tips on the Firefox for Linux «nicer widgets»-thingy. I’ll look into it. :]

Ah, I know a user who really likes his links to be _blue_, so has that in his user style.

By: Megan

Megan — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:28:51 +0000

I use user stylesheets quite often on an site-by-site basis. I have made some alerations to remove annoyances from sites I visit often. I also sometimes make my own print stylesheets for sites that don’t have them.

By far the most annoying problem I encounter when writing stylesheets for other sites is bad coding. Tables and div-itis make this task really difficult. You wouldn’t believe the amount of bad code out there!

I have a litte wiki site at mystylesheet.org to share user CSS (for all browsers) if anyone’s interested. It’s pretty dead though.

Opera also hs a lot of built-in user CSS for accessibility and development. I use those sometimes too.

By: NatalieMac

NatalieMac — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:11:07 +0000

For those times I’m forced to use IE because the site won’t work in FF, I have a user stylesheet that prevents wiley designers from changing the colors of my scrollbars.

By: Jon

Jon — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:16:27 +0000

@trovster: That’s something I hadn’t thought of before — native browser CSS application in exactly the situation you describe. I’ll be sure to keep that in mind from now on, thanks for pointing it out.

By: trovster

trovster — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:32:10 +0000

One thing I do, to combat certain FF extensions is add the following:

input, textarea {background-color: #fff !important;}

This stops the yellow ‘auto-complete’ fields when using the Google Toolbar (like I see on this form, infact).

I personally don’t use these auto-complete fields, but I can see this overriding as a slight problem to those who do. However, I have seen some designs where the font colour contrasts with the new yellow background. So, in this situation, adding the !important sorts it out. And I see this as the justification.