Usability/Usability humor
Sunday, January 26, 2003[2:39:00 PM]
We -- infamously -- showed how to use your "user" stylesheet to undo zeldman.com's justification of body text.
A new wrinkle is to add a unique class or id to your web pages as a "hook" to allow frequent visitors to override your styles.
For example:
<body id="licentious-radio">
in my webpages would allow you to override my styles without affecting other websites:
body#licentious-radio p {text-align: justify; font-family: verdana; font-size: 11px}
(Don't try this quite yet. We haven't updated our templates.)
This is a fine cooperative-hack. But it just rubs your nose in the obvious design flaw: you should be able to specify user styles by domain and url, the way we can specify cookies.
I'm not, of course, suggesting that a large percentage of browser users will ever learn CSS syntax and memorize the jumble of features and property names. But browsers *could* give us an easy interface to tweak the display of sites we use frequently.
For example, many websites set font sizes that are uncomfortably small for many users. Some browsers let a user "zoom" a web page. I'm suggesting the browser let you easily add user styles for that website so that the user sees readably-sized text on every page on every visit, with only one command.
Copyright © 2003 Licentious Radio.
Last update: 2/1/03; 4:50:03 PM.