This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Web Buzz
by Stuart Langridge.
Original Post: CSS signatures on every site
Feed Title: as days pass by
Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/kryogenix
Feed Description: scratched tallies on the prison wall
Remember the CSS signature idea? That was a good idea, that. The theory is: everyone puts a unique identifier, like the domain name, as the id on the body tag of their HTML. So, here, it would be
<body id="www-kryogenix.org">
(replace dots with dashes)
Then people can adjust my CSS to their own preference using user stylesheets and an appropriate CSS selector. Don’t like my link colours? Change ‘em! Just say:
#www-kryogenix-org a { color: red; }
in your user stylesheet and then this site will have red links. Neat idea. However, unsurprisingly, it does rather rely on the whole world picking up the idea, and it did, unsurprisingly, not happen.
Now, of course, in our Brave New World, and with this being the Year Of The DOM and all, we have GreaseMonkey to run scripts for us which can be attached to certain sites. These should be doing DOM manipulation things, and indeed they can do. Some of them aren’t, though: the list of GreaseMonkey User Scripts has an awful lot that say things like “remove sidebar from CNN” and “remove this offensive thing from that site” and so on. This is what CSS signatures were for…but no-one uses them. So, combine the two. Have a GreaseMonkey script that adds a CSS signature to every site you visit, and then adjust things in your user stylesheet. That oughta work.
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