CrumblingCustomization

There are some nice parallels between classical artists and web page designers. For many centuries painters have experimented with pigments, solvents, binders, carriers, canvases, papers, woods, brushes, and just about every other aspect of capturing images on surfaces. They've tried the most bizarre chemical concoctions imaginable (and in some cases, unmentionable). They've varied the physical processes of drawing and painting, and have explored countless possibilities for how to treat their works to preserve them when finished.

And, like mutations in genes, most artistic experiments are failures. Colors fade; layers crack and peel off; lacquers become opaque; mold, mildew, and insects chew into materials. Catastrophic deterioration sometimes becomes apparent within a few years, in other cases only after decades have passed.

Just so, the results of hyper-customization in web page creation. A designer can craft a lovely layout, with meticulous control of font and color --- and it only works with a particular browser, on a particular display size and resolution, under a particular operating system. Try to see it with a different configuration, and it's ugly or even unreadable.

And just wait until next year's "upgrade" to see how ephemeral and short-lived are style-sheet-nazi attempts to dictate the viewer's experience ....

(note JonathanSturm's comments on this and related themes in his Ephemerides (early 2003 at http://www.sturmsoft.com); see also SomethingToSay (13 Apr 2002), ...)

TopicArt - TopicProgramming - Datetag20030118

I find the term "stylesheet-nazi" very misleading, if not meaningless, because stylesheets are defined as recommendations and rendering guide only. It is up to the client to accept/interpret or reject/ignore CSS directives as appropriate to the user's preference settings. Furthermore, the "cascading" part of CSS means that a user CSS directive can always override a site one for any given rendering characteristic.

The Opera browser provides a window-specific button to turn off site CSS just like that. One of the things I liked about it. Other browsers don't always have the option so visible, but it should be there somewhere, including the option to set a local CSS file to have priority over a site's styling. Sometimes you just have a selection of preferred colors, link-colors and fonts/sizes. Control-plus and -minus appear pretty standard font size adjusters on the client side, no matter how specified in the CSS. IE support for this is poor and inconsistent, however, and I believe breaks when fonts (and other elements) are specified in absolute terms, especially if in the HTML rather than as CSS. -- BoLeuf

You've got a point, Bo ... I think I came up with "stylesheet-nazi" because of its alliteration (sibilance) more than its accuracy ... and of course, HTML itself is supposed to fail softly and gracefully ....

But on the other side, I must mention a book I saw some years ago, wherein a self-styled graphical artist recommended putting all ones web page text into graphics so as to maintain greater control over the appearance --- zowie!

^z = MarkZimmermann

I know, I've seen that kind of recommendation myself, including the use of resized blank gifs to tweak layout. Gngh... of course it's true, that a rendered graphics block is the only way to guarantee a particular font or logo to appear reasonably close to the artist's intent. As a logo, maybe. As site content, no way. -- BoLeuf

(correlates: WikiCss, TouchdownToRevelation, SirJonathan, ...)