Sent by Eric A. Meyer on 28 September 2002 16:04
Hey all,
Starting this morning, I modified meyerweb.com to have the
following on every page[1]:
<body id="www-meyerweb-com">
Why? To allow anyone who wants to restyle my site to do so simply by
adding the appropriate rules to a user stylesheet. By using
descendant selectors starting with the site ID, the styles will apply
only to pages on my site. So let's say you don't like my font
choice. Add the following to a user stylesheet:
#www-meyerweb-com {font: 1em Times, serif;}
#www-meyerweb-com * {font-family: Times, serif;}
You can change colors, reposition elements, set everything to
'display: none'-- whatever you want to do to my site, the field is
now open. Some of you may remember that the public archives' 'body'
elements have an 'id' of #css-d-archive for the very same reason (see
Simon's original beta post at
<http://archivist.incutio.com/css-discuss/?id=10466>).
The change to meyerweb was made as the result of a thread in
comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets titled "User stylesheets
for specific sites" and it was in that thread that a name was given
to this practice: CSS signatures. The informal standards for CSS
signatures are still settling down, but the obvious one seems to be
that you take the base URL of your site, convert the dots to hyphens,
and you're done.
So feel free to play around with styling my site, or the archives,
or any other site you find that has a CSS signature, and especially
feel free to add your own signature! We'll have to set up a wiki
page where people can list their site signatures... and speaking of
the wiki, I'll have to see about having it signed as well.
[1] Except for css/edge and any random pages I may have missed in the
find-and-replace process.
--
Eric A. Meyer [EMAIL-REMOVED]) http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/
Author, "Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide,"
"Eric Meyer on CSS," "CSS 2.0 Programmer's Reference," and more
http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/books/
