If you've been reading my blog for a while, you'll probably know I'm a big fan of user styles and I've been a cheerleader for the URIid extension and the new Gecko work (not in Firefox 1.0) which obsoletes that extension.
Here's a nice example: Skinning Gmail by Mihai Parparita over at [persistent.info]. We can use AdBlock, and manually edit userContent.css, etc, but I can't wait until we have some WYSIWYG editor for all of this.
Just think; you visit a page, turn on "style mode" and your browser turns into a WYSIWYG editor letting you redesign the page to your liking and save that information for when you next visit the site.
Wouldn't that be cool! Well, as you can see from Mihai's example, we're headed that way -- and boy am I'm excited.
Posted by asa at October 6, 2004 05:58 PMHi there
is there the way in FireFox to turn the author style off by shortcut key like in Opera?
dmitry -- if you install the web developer extension, ctrl+shift+d
Posted by: glob on October 6, 2004 10:57 PMAsa, where can I find out about the Gecko work that obsoletes URIid?
There's bug #41975, but it hasn't seen much action lately - maybe we should introduce bug #41975 URIid extension...
Posted by: DaveB on October 7, 2004 01:18 AMIt's bug 238099 , fixed since Moz 1.8a3.
Posted by: Sébastien Desvignes on October 7, 2004 02:11 AMAnd what happens when the page layout changes? (Ideally the "old" information is simply not applied as it's no longer relevant).
How do you detect layout changes?
Even a small layout change could potentially break the custom CSS. The most thorough and guaranteed method would be to store the the DOM tree and applied styles for every element along with the modified CSS and only apply the CSS if it's "the same page," e.g. the same DOM tree with the same styles for every single element in it.
If anyone else has any better ideas for programatically ensuring that user CSS styles apply to only the pages they're intended to apply to, I'd be happy to hear.
I agree such functionality would be "cool," asa, but not-insignificant technical challenges must be overcome before this can happen "the Right Way."
Posted by: Ben Karel on October 7, 2004 08:03 AMIf this gets popular, maybe webmasters will try to make it impossible by NOT separating form/content, because they don't want their websites to be changed... Maybe I'm a little too pessimistic now.
Posted by: Blimundus on October 7, 2004 10:17 AMThis sounds so neat, I will have to try alter the /. appearance by removing those god damn italics in every post they add. Why not use diff color or font... italics make it so much harder to read.
Posted by: Donny on October 7, 2004 01:59 PMAsa, could you post some more examples of ways to use urlID, it looks like a great extension, but i'ld like to see more examples so i could figure out how to better use it
Posted by: Mike on October 8, 2004 06:31 AM