Eric Meyer: Elemental Nomenclature. If I had to name everything the same it would stifle my creativity so much I think I’d go back to tables. A better start to this would be instead of looking at the naming scheme of a dozen or so web designers, look at the naming scheme of widely used blog software. Is it worth all that work for such an amazingly small minority of users though? User stylesheets have never taken off, and I seriously doubt they ever will.
Oh, Matt, you cut-up! Just remember the emoticon next time, so people can more easily tell that you’re exaggerating for humorous effect.
Global user stylesheets are a poor idea, because so much of the web is built in crazy ways that mean a user stylesheet could easily result in unreadable sites. Custom styles on a per-site basis (as enabled by Eric’s CSS signatures) are much, much more useful but they need to be a browser supported feature rather than relying on the site author adding a unique ID. I’d love to be able to change the default typeface on Slashdot for example. Of course, there’s no chance of custom stylesheets per site taking off with the general browsing population because you have to know CSS to use them. Maybe a friendly UI on top of the custom per-site stylesheet would help though – “Always make the text slightly larger for this site”, “Change this site’s background colour to X” etc.
“Maybe a friendly UI on top of the custom per-site stylesheet would help though” – Now theres an Idea!
It is at times like these, when people come up with ideas like this, that I wish I was able to hack together an extension for firefox to do just this.
Is anybody that can hack firefox extensions listening???!!!
Simon: some of the work has been started. For example since some versions, Epiphany supports saving a site’s text size. When I used that browser, I found that feature wonderful. 🙂
Matt, I think that it should be noted that I am *not* proposing a standard style-sheet or document structure, just that if a designer includes a specific element on a page, to call it a specific name. As a designer, how this can be perceived as “˜creativity stifling’ is beyond me.
You have prompted me to rethink my logic and add a new column at http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/whats_in_a_name_pt2.html
I have already done this. Slashdot’s source only specifies a serif font. So since my default serif font in Firefox is Georgia, I now get slashdot in Georgia. For many sites, it’s as simple as changing your default fonts.
I personally prefer Eric’s idea of giving the body tag and id, allowing per-site changes to be made. I’d hate to be forced to use a naming scheme, it just poses too many problems.