Grauw’s blog

While I was surfing around a little (surfing – great word) I stumbled upon an old blog entry by Ian Hickson, a.k.a. ‘Hixie’, where he is commenting on the markup of a site. While I was reading it, somewhere halfway he mentioned that the site he was looking at did not fare well with custom user stylesheets.

Apparantly Hixie at the time liked to have a customized style sheet on his browser – the thing I used in my August 23rd post – where he set the background colour to dark red and the text colour to white. In essence it came down to three simple rules. So in my strive for perfection, I tried to see how well this site liked that...

Ops! Not so well at all. So, I made some tweaks. The ground rule is pretty much like this: if you define a specific background colour, also set a matching text colour (and vice versa). If the custom colours are too different from white it may not always look pretty, but at least it is readable. If only CSS3’s rgba had worked... I also uploaded my ‘tree’ menu background PNG file again, as I apparantly forgot to turn on alpha transparency in the one which was online. Now it nicely blends with the background colour again. PNG rules :). Of course, no candy for IE users as usual.

As a bonus I added an alternate ‘Hixie’ stylesheet to this site (take a look at the css), which applies the dark-red background, and has a few additional small colour tweaks as well to make for a more pleasant browsing experience :). It’s very short, importing the regular style sheet and making a few modifications. Try it out with your Firefox style switcher.

On a side note, it seems that fantasai is getting really busy with the alternate style sheet switcher (at least I’m seeing a fair lot of activity on the bugs involved), so hopefully by the time Firefox 1.0 gets released it will be back in. And perhaps we will even see persistent style switching, though I wouldn’t count on it.

Finally, I also found some other nice (old) posts in Hixie’s blog about Linux, which kindly reminded me of my own Linux experience :). Funny how I apparantly don’t seem to be the only one running into that kind of nonsense. Linux got its charm, sure, but you need to be prepared to put a lot of your time in it. In the meantime I’lll stick to Windows ^_^.

p.s. Tomorrow is DevCon summer 2004 (MSX)... But I can’t attend, I have to work :(. *sniff*

Grauw

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