Comments on: User Style Sheets Come of Age

By: Megan

Megan — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 22:13:36 +0000

As someone who writes a lot of user stylesheets (and has a site to share them!) I can say that the biggest problem is that the coding on most sites sucks. Even trying to enlarge the font size on a site can lead ot hour of weeding through bad HTML and even worse CSS. The enduring prevalence of tabled layouts is another problem, although that can be overcome to some extent with attribute selectors.

Sorry for the delay in responding to this - someone sent me the link in a commnent about my site and I’m just getting around to reading it! My site is at mystylesheet.org if you’re interested. It’s meant for users of all browsers, not just Firefox.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:15:40 +0000

Being a person who provides technology support to people with disabilities for several years now, and someone who is profoundly colour blind, I can, without fear of contradiction, state that no-one likes my custom style sheets.
Most of the web designers that I deal with are mortified at what I can do with a few simple tweaks to my browser.
There in lies my point: “It’s MY browser”.
The styles presented by the developer are merely suggestion that can be accepted or ignored.
I learned a long time ago that what is good for some is not good for all.

By: Paul Annesley

Paul Annesley — Wed, 30 May 2007 11:08:27 +0000

mrsmiley: In the example given, I’d say that this user stylesheet for Google Reader does nothing to improve usability or accessibility, and it makes Reader look less like a Google application.

So there’s no way Google would adopt it as their primary style, nor would they add the complexity of selectable skins/themes for Reader.

Yet as a user stylesheet, it provides an alternate interface which many people (but still a minority) prefer. Also, this example aims to make Reader look more like a Mac OS application, to help it blend in to Mac desktops. Mac users are another minority for now.

Google themselves seem to at least passively encourage things like user scripts and user style, with a Google Reader developer releasing a Grease Monkey userscript to integrate Reader into the Gmail interface.

I think it’s great that minority groups and individuals are able to create and share new ways of presenting the data from websites and web applications without needing the approval of the site owner, and I think site owners should embrace this - after all, it leads to a larger and happier user base.

By: andrew.k

andrew.k — Wed, 30 May 2007 07:43:10 +0000

There simply is no way to tell whether visitors to your site are customising your site to suit their own preferences, including the removal of ads.

Sure there is, by checking the computed style of the elements in question. But if you’re paranoid enough to write JavaScript to detect if users are hiding your ads, you’ve got bigger problems to deal with :)

By: AlexW

AlexW — Wed, 30 May 2007 00:23:24 +0000

What if you end up using user-stylesheets to remove the adverts on sites? Like S.P. for instance…

surely this is going to upset people?

No use getting too upset about it, Chris. Once the page leaves the server you have to let it go. ;)

Our audience, by it’s nature, is more likely to customize their browsing experience as a matter of course — we all do. Even our office admins run greasemonkey to customize the way Cerberus (customer support system) works.

By: Matthew Magain

Matthew Magain — Tue, 29 May 2007 22:43:21 +0000

@chris: No doubt this is happening already, for sites like sitepoint.com and others. There simply is no way to tell whether visitors to your site are customising your site to suit their own preferences, including the removal of ads.

By: chris ward

chris ward — Tue, 29 May 2007 15:04:30 +0000

What if you end up using user-stylesheets to remove the adverts on sites? Like S.P. for instance…

surely this is going to upset people?

By: cranial-bore

cranial-bore — Mon, 28 May 2007 23:40:46 +0000

The link to the stylish extension is broken, but luckily being the amazing web professional that I am I was able to figure it out ;)

To me the main benefit of user style sheets is to fix minor usability issues for sites I frequent. For example some have small text with lacklustre leading. Increasing the text sizes just pushes the lines even closer together. Now I can fix that :)

By: mrsmiley

mrsmiley — Mon, 28 May 2007 22:48:35 +0000

Ok, I get that some people here find them useful, but has anyone actually submitted that stylesheet back to the site owner as a suggested enhancement for their site? If your stylesheet truly does improve the usability of the site (not hiding images and ads because obviously that wont be accepted), then surely you almost have a duty to try and share that with the rest of the world rather than the few savy enough to use a service like userstyles.org.

This would essentially solve problem #4 because the onus is back on the owner, not the users to fix the problem.

By: charmedlover

charmedlover — Mon, 28 May 2007 14:40:30 +0000

Yes, Opera has had support for user style-sheets for quite some time. And as brothercake expressed, it has taken awhile for Firefox to copy this feature to a useful state.

Nevertheless, I have found a number of uses for user style-sheets myself, especially with the recent interface improvements in Opera 9 as to applying these style-sheets. They serve most useful for websites that have so much information, but just have a really, really bad design that makes it hard to navigate. The best example of this for me is PHPclasses, which has lots of good information, but is nearly impossible to easily navigate.

However, I do find user JS files much more useful overall.