This is not a startup idea. It may be a small Firefox (or even Greasemonkey) extension. However...
This is one of the reasons I think CSS should have been designed to be selected client side, not server side. (in other words, the CSS is selected by the user's browser options)h I should be able to decide how I view my websites, not some two-bit wanna-be web designer who thinks that black text on a black background makes GREAT contrast.
Ok, I exaggerate, and it's only rarely that I come across sites that are that horrid (that I still want to read, at least), but the point I'm making is that the theming should be in my hands.
If HTML was more semantic (<navbar><navitem.../></navbar>) it might even mean that mobile browsers don't have to work as hard trying to figure out what to do with massive sidebars that push the content down 30 scrollbar lengths; they just shove the <navbar> stuff into a dropdown menu, for example.
And thus ends my mini-rant about annoying style issues. Things are too embedded to change any time in the near future, even if everyone on the W3C completely agreed, but one can still dream...
Sites can be designed semantically and thus easily themed (e.g. http://www.csszengarden.com/ lets you apply totally different themes easily), but most sites are designed poorly
No, What I want isn't possible with CSS adding turing-completeness to CSS, or using massive javascript hacks, and special-casing every browser out there. And even then, you'd end up with inconsistent behavior across websites.
I want to be able to -- for example -- on my blackberry, just drop the navigation into a button that I click on to show the links. I want the titlebar of a site to drop all the images -- don't even download them. Data is expensive in Canada.
I want to have the list of subscribers turn into a simple link to a new page, and only display the body of the article I'm reading. Anything else can be hidden in a menu in the browser (file->navigation->list of links, perhaps?)
And most importantly, I want to configure this on my end. I don't want to be constrained to the web designer's lame ideas about layout
I'm not sure what "the titlebar of a site to drop all the images" means.
I remember the early browsers (we're talking Mosaic and Netscape .9 here) having support for "navigational links" (although Wikipedia only talks about the link element, and doesn't have much information on this) rendered as a list of buttons across the top of the rendering frame. The only place I remember seeing this heavily used was on some site that Eolas (http://eolas.com/, yes, the plug-in patent Eolas, who I was tangentially involved with back in the mid-90s). I don't think it caught on because, really, internal, embedded links are more a more valuable, user-friendly, and web-page UI component. Additionally, I don't think many designers (or whatever you called people who built web pages back then) used them because it was kind of an obscure feature and it didn't get you as much control over the display as even a simple list of links did back then. It's really something that should be brought back, but it would most likely get abused anyway. The limited space used in the original rendering would make navigation more difficult, as the site author would consider different things to be important to navigate to than actual users would (for example, how often do you actually need instant access to the "about us" page?).
I find it tremendously useful to have a site's shitty design, layout and navigation help indicate early on, before I get frustrated with it, if the site is even worth visiting or coming back to. "Well, the person behind this site obviously doesn't want me to find anything on it, time to head somewhere else".
I think that was actually the intention of CSS, and you can also somehow tell Firefox to use stylesheets of your own liking. I can't tell you how, because I have never needed that feature.
Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.
The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.
<div id="header">
...
</div>
only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.
Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.
The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.
<div id="header">
...
</div>
only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.
Comments
This is not a startup idea. It may be a small Firefox (or even Greasemonkey) extension. However...
This is one of the reasons I think CSS should have been designed to be selected client side, not server side. (in other words, the CSS is selected by the user's browser options)h I should be able to decide how I view my websites, not some two-bit wanna-be web designer who thinks that black text on a black background makes GREAT contrast.
Ok, I exaggerate, and it's only rarely that I come across sites that are that horrid (that I still want to read, at least), but the point I'm making is that the theming should be in my hands.
If HTML was more semantic (<navbar><navitem.../></navbar>) it might even mean that mobile browsers don't have to work as hard trying to figure out what to do with massive sidebars that push the content down 30 scrollbar lengths; they just shove the <navbar> stuff into a dropdown menu, for example.
And thus ends my mini-rant about annoying style issues. Things are too embedded to change any time in the near future, even if everyone on the W3C completely agreed, but one can still dream...
Sites can be designed semantically and thus easily themed (e.g. http://www.csszengarden.com/ lets you apply totally different themes easily), but most sites are designed poorly
No, What I want isn't possible with CSS adding turing-completeness to CSS, or using massive javascript hacks, and special-casing every browser out there. And even then, you'd end up with inconsistent behavior across websites.
I want to be able to -- for example -- on my blackberry, just drop the navigation into a button that I click on to show the links. I want the titlebar of a site to drop all the images -- don't even download them. Data is expensive in Canada.
I want to have the list of subscribers turn into a simple link to a new page, and only display the body of the article I'm reading. Anything else can be hidden in a menu in the browser (file->navigation->list of links, perhaps?)
And most importantly, I want to configure this on my end. I don't want to be constrained to the web designer's lame ideas about layout
I'm not sure what "the titlebar of a site to drop all the images" means.
I remember the early browsers (we're talking Mosaic and Netscape .9 here) having support for "navigational links" (although Wikipedia only talks about the link element, and doesn't have much information on this) rendered as a list of buttons across the top of the rendering frame. The only place I remember seeing this heavily used was on some site that Eolas (http://eolas.com/, yes, the plug-in patent Eolas, who I was tangentially involved with back in the mid-90s). I don't think it caught on because, really, internal, embedded links are more a more valuable, user-friendly, and web-page UI component. Additionally, I don't think many designers (or whatever you called people who built web pages back then) used them because it was kind of an obscure feature and it didn't get you as much control over the display as even a simple list of links did back then. It's really something that should be brought back, but it would most likely get abused anyway. The limited space used in the original rendering would make navigation more difficult, as the site author would consider different things to be important to navigate to than actual users would (for example, how often do you actually need instant access to the "about us" page?).
I find it tremendously useful to have a site's shitty design, layout and navigation help indicate early on, before I get frustrated with it, if the site is even worth visiting or coming back to. "Well, the person behind this site obviously doesn't want me to find anything on it, time to head somewhere else".
I think that was actually the intention of CSS, and you can also somehow tell Firefox to use stylesheets of your own liking. I can't tell you how, because I have never needed that feature.
Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.
The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.
only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.
The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.
only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.HTML _is_ more semantic. It's perfect for marking up text.