User Style Sheets. When’s the last time you tried to use one of those?

You might know Eric Meyer as the author of a couple of really good books on Cascading Style Sheets. You might not know him as the author of The CSS Anarchist’s Cookbook, which I remember following a few years back to break other peoples’ designs with by applying my own styles in my own browser.

(I’m going to digress for a moment to say that a couple of posts on meyerweb and another site lead to an interesting discussion on the Cre8site forums - SES San Jose Corrections. Oddly, I visited not to see if there was a positive outcome to that thread (there was), but to revisit his CSS shenanigans with user-style sheets.)

CSS allows us to define styles for a site that we build. But it also allows people to define their own styles in a browser. That ability can be really helpful, especially when a designer might make a site where the text is on the small side, and can’t be resized.

I hadn’t heard of any acts of Usability Guerillas implementing the power of CSS user-style sheets to protest the redesign of a site before. Adrian Holovaty has done just that, with a Site specific browser extension for the FireFox browser that will show the newly redesigned All Music Guide in a more user friendly configuration.

Reading the following, I’m wondering who’s next:

There’s a huge potential here. Site-specific Firefox extensions are an elegant, one-click-install solution to the problem of, well, lousy Web interfaces — a problem Web users have had to shut up and deal with for as long as the Web has been around.

Let’s do more of these things.

I’ve got to go now, and play with Eric Meyer’s CSS Anarchist Cookbook. It’s been three or four years since I used it, and I remember it being kind of fun.

via webword