Tag Archives: CSS

HTML lets Web designers annoy you with tags like embed, marquee, and blink, or with light green text against a blue-sky background. You can just curse or use a different site, but there’s a way to fight back: custom CSS in your browser. It can not only disable whole tags, but modify or get rid of unwanted elements in a site by setting rules for their classes.

You need to know CSS pretty well to venture into this; I’m assuming you’re comfortable with it. If you are, the tricky part is just to find out where it goes. For Firefox under OS X, under the “Help” menu, choose “Troubleshooting information.” In the window that comes up, look under “Application Basics” for “Profile Folder.” There’s a “Show in Finder” button next to it. Click on this, and you’ll see the directory which holds your profile.
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Lately I’ve been looking at CSS3 animations as a possible solution to a problem I’ve been dealing with. But after thinking about it, I’m getting more concerned: CSS animations? CSS is supposed to be about the layout of a page, not the creation of special effects. I’ve seen pages describing supposedly wonderful effects that can be created with CSS3. Fine, but what if you don’t want them?

JavaScript and Flash product many annoying effects, introduced by designers who effectively are yelling “Hey, look how clever we are!” at you while you’re trying to concentrate on reading. You can turn off JavaScript and Flash and still get readable content, at least with many sites. But turn off CSS and most modern web pages will turn into a messy jumble. CSS3 looks like a narcissistic web designer’s dream: a way to bombard you with special effects that you just can’t escape from.

If you aren’t worried yet, consider this post on how to do Flash-like ads using only CSS3.

Addendum: The CSS3 working draft was recently updated.