Re: specificity and user style sheets

On 06/06/01 06:39 (GMT-0400) Bjoern Hoehrmann apparently typed:

> In practise user style sheets don't work very well though as author
> styles are typically not robust enough to cope with the differences.

You're being too kind. Author styles as a practical matter can't be
robust enough on most sites, where authors use 20k, 30k, 40k or more of
styles, with classes and ids for virtually everything. I've tried, and
in fact use on that goes pretty far in trying. Here's an example of just
some of what it takes to get readable text more often than not via a
user stylesheet:

html>body, body code, body p code, body div, body dl, body form,
html, body input, body label, body li, body ol, body p, body pre,
body td, body td a, body textarea, body th, body ul,
#body, .body, .bodyText,
#content, #content1, #content2, #content3,
.content, .content1, .content2, .content3,
.defaultText, #main, .main, #main p, .main p,
#main-content, .main-content, #main-content p, .main-content p,
.mediumText, .normal, .regular, .standard, .text
	{font-size: medium !important;
	line-height: normal !important;}

This all too often leads to a lot of hidden or overlapping text. More
often than not, it's a whole lot easier just to disable styles entirely,
or use the browser's minimum font size option if color isn't the
obstacle. The recent activity on
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31961 is encouraging, but I
guess even better would be a feature to disregard all author styles
while enabling user styles. It's unfortunate that CSS gives authors so
much power to make life for users and UA programmers so difficult. The
only user stylesheets that are really workable are those that browser
permit to be applied on a per-site basis, but even that only applies to
the dearth of elite users who actually understand CSS.
-- 
"All have sinned & fall short of the glory of God." Romans 3:23 NIV

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409

Felix Miata  ***  http://mrmazda.no-ip.com/

Received on Thursday, 1 June 2006 15:05:52 UTC