rowid,title,contents,year,author,author_slug,published,url,topic 112,User Styling,"During the recent US elections, Twitter decided to add an ‘election bar’ as part of their site design. You could close it if it annoyed you, but the action wasn’t persistent and the bar would always come back like a bad penny. The solution to common browsing problems like this is CSS. ‘User styling’ (or the creepy ‘skinning’) is the creation of CSS rules to customise and personalise a particular domain. Aside from hiding adverts and other annoyances, there are many reasons for taking the time and effort to do it: Improving personal readability by changing text size and colour Personalising the look of a web app like GMail to look less insipid Revealing microformats Sport! My dreams of site skinning tennis are not yet fully realised, but it’ll be all the rage by next Christmas, believe me. Hopefully you’re now asking “But how? HOW?!”. The process of creating a site skin is roughly as follows: See something you want to change Find out what it’s called, and if any rules already apply to it Write CSS rule(s) to override and/or enhance it. Apply the rules So let’s get stuck in… See something Let’s start small with Multimap.com. Look at that big header – it takes up an awful lot of screen space doesn’t it? No matter, we can fix it. Tools Now we need to find out where that big assed header is in the DOM, and make overriding CSS rules. The best tool I’ve found yet is the Mac OS X app, CSS Edit. It utilises a slick ‘override stylesheets’ function and DOM Inspector. Rather than give you all the usual DOM inspection tools, CSS Edit’s is solely concerned with style. Go into ‘X-Ray’ mode, click an element, and look at the inspector window to see every style rule governing it. Click the selector to be taken to where it lives in the CSS. It really is a user styling dream app. Having said all that, you can achieve all this with free, cross platform tools – namely Firefox with the Firebug and Stylish extensions. We’ll be using them for these examples, so make sure you have them installed if you want to follow along. Using Firebug, we can see that the page is very helpfully marked up, and that whole top area is simply a div with an ID of header. Change Something When you installed Stylish, it added a page and brush icon to your status bar. Click on that, and choose Write Style > for Multimap.com. The other options allow you to only create a style for a particular part of a website or URL, but we want this to apply to the whole of Multimap: The ‘Add Style’ window then pops up, with the @-moz-document query at the top: @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain(""multimap.com"") { } All you need to do is add the CSS to hide the header, in between the curly brackets. @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain(""multimap.com"") { #header {display: none;} } A click of the preview button shows us that it’s worked! Now the map appears further up the page. The ethics of hiding adverts is a discussion for another time, but let’s face it, when did you last whoop at the sight of a banner? Make Something Better If we’re happy with our modifications, all we need to do is give it a name and save. Whenever you visit Multimap.com, the style will be available. Stylish also allows you to toggle a style on/off via the status bar menu. If you feel you want to share this style with the world, then userstyles.org is the place to do it. It’s a grand repository of customisations that Stylish connects with. Whenever you visit a site, you can see if anyone else has written a style for it, again, via the status bar menu “Find Styles for this Page”. Selecting this with “BBC News” shows that there are plenty of options, ranging from small layout tweaks to redesigns: What’s more, whenever a style is updated, Stylish will notify you, and offer a one-click process to update it. This does only work in Firefox and Flock, so I’ll cover ways of applying site styles to other browsers later. Specific Techniques Important! In the Multimap example there wasn’t a display specified on that element, but it isn’t always going to be that easy. You may have spent most of your CSS life being a good designer and not resorting to adding !important to give your rule priority. There’s no way to avoid this in user styling – if you’re overriding an existing rule it’s a necessity! Be prepared to be typing !important a lot. Star Selector The Universal Selector is a particularly useful way to start a style. For example, if we want to make Flickr use Helvetica before Arial (as they should’ve done!), we can cover all occurrences with just one rule: * {font-family: ""Helvetica Neue"", Helvetica, sans-serif !important;} You can also use it to select ‘everything within an element’, by placing it after the element name: #content * {font-family: ""Helvetica Neue"", Helvetica, sans-serif !important;} Swapping Images If you’re changing something a little more complex, such as Google Reader, then at some point you’ll probably want to change an . The technique for replacing an image involves: making your replacement image the background of the tag adding padding top and left to the size of you image to push the ‘top’ image away making the height and width zero. The old image is then pushed out of the way and hidden from view, allowing the replacement in the background to be revealed. Targeting the image may require using an attribute selector: img[src=""/reader/ui/3544433079-tree-view-folder-open.gif""] { padding: 16px 0 0 16px; width: 0 !important; height: 0 !important; background-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAABAAAAAQCAYA AAAf8/9hAAAABHNCSVQICAgIfAhkiAAAAAlwSFlzAAALEgAACxIB0t1+/AAAA Bx0RVh0U29mdHdhcmUAQWRvYmUgRmlyZXdvcmtzIENTM5jWRgMAAAAVdE VYdENyZWF0aW9uIFRpbWUAMjkvNi8wOJJ/BVgAAAG3SURBVDiNpZIhb5RBEIaf 2W+vpIagIITSBIHBgsGjEYQaFLYShcITDL+ABIPnh4BFN0GQNFA4Cnf3fbszL2L3 jiuEVLDJbCazu8+8Mzsmif9ZBvDy7bvXlni0HRe8eXL/zuPzABng62J5kFKaAQS QgJAOgHMB9vDZq+d71689Hcyw9LfAZAYdioE10VSJo6OPL/KNvSuHD+7dhU 0vHEsDUUWJChIlYJIjFx5BuMB2mJY/DnMoOJl/R147oBUR0QAm8LAGCOEh3IO ULiAl8jSOy/nPetGsbGRKjktEiBCEHMlQj4loCuu4zCXCi4lUHTNDtGqEiACTqAFSI OgAUAKv4bkWVy2g6tAbJtGy0TNugM3HADmlurKH27dVZSecxjboXggiAsMItR h99wTILdewYRpXVJWtY85k7fPW8e1GpJFJacgesXs6VYYomz9G2yDhwPB7NEB BDAMK7WYJlisYVBCpfaJBeB+eocFyVyAgCaoMCTJSTOOCWSyILrAnaXpSexRsx GGAZ0AR+XT+5fjzyfwSpnUB/1w64xizVI/t6q3b+58+vJ96mWtLf9haxNoc8M v7N3d+AT4XPcFIxghoAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) no-repeat !important; } Woah boy! What was all that gubbins in the background-image? It was a Data URI, and you can create these easily with Hixie’s online tool. It’s simply the image translated into text so that it can be embedded in the CSS, cutting down on the number of http requests. It’s also a necessity with Mozilla browsers, as they don’t allow user CSS to reference images stored locally. Converting images to URI’s avoids this, as well as making a style easily portable – no images folder to pass around. Don’t forget all your other CSS techniques at your disposal: inserting your own content with :before and :after pseudo classes, make elements semi-transparent with opacity and round box corners without hacking . You can have fun, and for once, enjoy the freedom of not worrying about IE! User styling without Stylish Instead of using the Stylish extension, you can add rules to the userContent.css file, or use @import in that file to load a separate stylesheet. You can find this is in /Library/Application Support/Camino/chrome/ on OS X, or C/Program Files/Mozilla Firefox/Chrome on Windows. This is only way to apply user styles in Camino, but what about other browsers? Opera & Omniweb: Both allow you to specify a custom CSS file as part of the site’s preferences. Opera also allows custom javascript, using the same syntax as Greasemonkey scripts (more on that below) Safari There are a few options here: the PithHelmet and SafariStand haxies both allow custom stylesheets, or alternatively, a Greasemonkey style user script can employed via GreaseKit. The latter is my favoured solution on my Helvetireader theme, as it can allow for more prescriptive domain rules, just like the Mozilla @-moz-document method. User scripts are also the solution supported by the widest range of browsers. What now? Hopefully I’ve given you enough information for you to be able start making your own styles. If you want to go straight in and tackle the ‘Holy Grail’, then off with you to GMail – I get more requests to theme that than anything else! If you’re a site author and want to encourage this sort of tom foolery, a good way is to provide a unique class or ID name with the body tag: This makes it very easy to write rules that only apply to that particular site. If you wanted to use Safari without any of the haxies mentioned above, this method means you can include rules in a general CSS file (chosen via Preferences > Advanced > Stylesheet) without affecting other sites. One final revelation on user styling – it’s not just for web sites. You can tweak the UI of Firefox itself with the userChrome.css. You’ll need to use the in-built DOM Inspector instead of Firebug to inspect the window chrome, instead of a page. Great if you want to make small tweaks (changing the size of tab text for example) without creating a full blown theme.",2008,Jon Hicks,jonhicks,2008-12-03T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2008/user-styling/,process 288,Displaying Icons with Fonts and Data- Attributes,"Traditionally, bitmap formats such as PNG have been the standard way of delivering iconography on websites. They’re quick and easy, and it also ensures they’re as pixel crisp as possible. Bitmaps have two drawbacks, however: multiple HTTP requests, affecting the page’s loading performance; and a lack of scalability, noticeable when the page is zoomed or viewed on a screen with a high pixel density, such as the iPhone 4 and 4S. The requests problem is normally solved by using CSS sprites, combining the icon set into one (physically) large image file and showing the relevant portion via background-position. While this works well, it can get a bit fiddly to specify all the positions. In particular, scalability is still an issue. A vector-based format such as SVG sounds ideal to solve this, but browser support is still patchy. The rise and adoption of web fonts have given us another alternative. By their very nature, they’re not only scalable, but resolution-independent too. No need to specify higher resolution graphics for high resolution screens! That’s not all though: Browser support: Unlike a lot of new shiny techniques, they have been supported by Internet Explorer since version 4, and, of course, by all modern browsers. We do need several different formats, however! Design on the fly: The font contains the basic graphic, which can then be coloured easily with CSS – changing colours for themes or :hover and :focus styles is done with one line of CSS, rather than requiring a new graphic. You can also use CSS3 properties such as text-shadow to add further effects. Using -webkit-background-clip: text;, it’s possible to use gradient and inset shadow effects, although this creates a bitmap mask which spoils the scalability. Small file size: specially designed icon fonts, such as Drew Wilson’s Pictos font, can be as little as 12Kb for the .woff font. This is because they contain fewer characters than a fully fledged font. You can see Pictos being used in the wild on sites like Garrett Murray’s Maniacal Rage. As with all formats though, it’s not without its disadvantages: Icons can only be rendered in monochrome or with a gradient fill in browsers that are capable of rendering CSS3 gradients. Specific parts of the icon can’t be a different colour. It’s only appropriate when there is an accompanying text to provide meaning. This can be alleviated by wrapping the text label in a tag (I like to use rather than , due to the fact that it’s smaller and isn’ t being used elsewhere) and then hiding it from view with text-indent:-999em. Creating an icon font can be a complex and time-consuming process. While font editors can carry out hinting automatically, the best results are achieved manually. Unless you’re adept at creating your own fonts, you’re restricted to what is available in the font. However, fonts like Pictos will cover the most common needs, and icons are most effective when they’re using familiar conventions. The main complaint about using fonts for icons is that it can mean adding a meaningless character to our markup. The good news is that we can overcome this by using one of two methods – CSS generated content or the data-icon attribute – in combination with the :before and :after pseudo-selectors, to keep our markup minimal and meaningful. Our simple markup looks like this: View Basket Note the multiple class attributes. Next, we’ll import the Pictos font using the @font-face web fonts property in CSS: @font-face { font-family: 'Pictos'; src: url('pictos-web.eot'); src: local('☺'), url('pictos-web.woff') format('woff'), url('pictos-web.ttf') format('truetype'), url('pictos-web.svg#webfontIyfZbseF') format('svg'); } This rather complicated looking set of rules is (at the time of writing) the most bulletproof way of ensuring as many browsers as possible load the font we want. We’ll now use the content property applied to the :before pseudo-class selector to generate our icon. Once again, we’ll use those multiple class attribute values to set common icon styles, then specific styles for .basket. This helps us avoid repeating styles: .icon { font-family: 'Pictos'; font-size: 22px: } .basket:before { content: ""$""; } What does the :before pseudo-class do? It generates the dollar character in a browser, even when it’s not present in the markup. Using the generated content approach means our markup stays simple, but we’ll need a new line of CSS, defining what letter to apply to each class attribute for every icon we add. data-icon is a new alternative approach that uses the HTML5 data- attribute in combination with CSS attribute selectors. This new attribute lets us add our own metadata to elements, as long as its prefixed by data- and doesn’t contain any uppercase letters. In this case, we want to use it to provide the letter value for the icon. Look closely at this markup and you’ll see the data-icon attribute. View Basket We could add others, in fact as many as we like. Favourites History Location Then, we need just one CSS attribute selector to style all our icons in one go: .icon:before { content: attr(data-icon); /* Insert your fancy colours here */ } By placing our custom attribute data-icon in the selector in this way, we can enable CSS to read the value of that attribute and display it before the element (in this case, the anchor tag). It saves writing a lot of CSS rules. I can imagine that some may not like the extra attribute, but it does keep it out of the actual content – generated or not. This could be used for all manner of tasks, including a media player and large simple illustrations. See the demo for live examples. Go ahead and zoom the page, and the icons will be crisp, with the exception of the examples that use -webkit-background-clip: text as mentioned earlier. Finally, it’s worth pointing out that with both generated content and the data-icon method, the letter will be announced to people using screen readers. For example, with the shopping basket icon above, the reader will say “dollar sign view basket”. As accessibility issues go, it’s not exactly the worst, but could be confusing. You would need to decide whether this method is appropriate for the audience. Despite the disadvantages, icon fonts have huge potential.",2011,Jon Hicks,jonhicks,2011-12-12T00:00:00+00:00,https://24ways.org/2011/displaying-icons-with-fonts-and-data-attributes/,code 324,Debugging CSS with the DOM Inspector,"An Inspector Calls The larger your site and your CSS becomes, the more likely that you will run into bizarre, inexplicable problems. Why does that heading have all that extra padding? Why is my text the wrong colour? Why does my navigation have a large moose dressed as Noel Coward on top of all the links? Perhaps you work in a collaborative environment, where developers and other designers are adding code? In which case, the likelihood of CSS strangeness is higher. You need to debug. You need Firefox’s wise-guy know-it-all, the DOM Inspector. The DOM Inspector knows where everything is in your layout, and more importantly, what causes it to look the way it does. So without further ado, load up any css based site in your copy of Firefox (or Flock for that matter), and launch the DOM Inspector from the Tools menu. The inspector uses two main panels – the left to show the DOM tree of the page, and the right to show you detail: The Inspector will look at whatever site is in the front-most window or tab, but you can also use it without another window. Type in a URL at the top (A), press ‘Inspect’ (B) and a third panel appears at the bottom, with the browser view. I find this layout handier than looking at a window behind the DOM Inspector. Step 1 – find your node! Each element on your page – be it a HTML tag or a piece of text, is called a ‘node’ of the DOM tree. These nodes are all listed in the left hand panel, with any ID or CLASS attribute values next to them. When you first look at a page, you won’t see all those yet. Nested HTML elements (such as a link inside a paragraph) have a reveal triangle next to their name, clicking this takes you one level further down. This can be fine for finding the node you want to look at, but there are easier ways. Say you have a complex rounded box technique that involves 6 nested DIVs? You’d soon get tired of clicking all those triangles to find the element you want to inspect. Click the top left icon © – “Find a node to inspect by clicking on it” and then select the area you want to inspect. Boom! All that drilling down the DOM tree has been done for you! Huzzah! If you’re looking for an element that you know has an ID (such as