In this world of an endless quest for information (I’m speaking of the great Internet), it is common to stumble upon old websites or websites that have been generated by an old software. A perfect example of this would be howtos, which, while they are very useful, really look like someone shitted on my monitor. Since I’m using one the Best Browser(tm), that is Firefox, I’ve been trying to tackle this problem. The angle of attack will be userContent.css. Many Firefox hacks are based on this file. To have more information on this file and on how to create it (and where), please read the Customizing Mozilla page.
In this file, we will be adding a new set of rules which will give a default behavior to old web pages. Some things to note about these changes. First, I did not include !important so that newer websites can still define their styles. Secondly, I’ve spent some times in adding/removing tags so that the very vast majority of websites are unaffected by theses changes, while the old websites are much better (in my opinion). Here are the content of the file:
body { font-family: Calibri, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; }
h1 { font-size: 175% }
h2 { font-size: 145% }
h3 { font-size: 120% }
h4 { font-size: 105% }
h5 { font-size: 80% }
h6 { font-size: 65% }
a[href] {color: #1133ff;}
a[href]:hover{text-decoration:underline;}
a[href]:visited{color: #1133ff;}
code,kbd,pre,samp,tt { font-family: Consolas, "Courier New", Courier, monospace; }
hr {
color: #999999;
background: transparent;
height: 1px; /* Required for IE/Win */
padding: 0;
border-color: #999999;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: none none solid none;
}
ol { list-style: decimal outside; }
ul { list-style: round outside; }
ol ul,
ol ol ul,
ol ul ul,
ul ul,
ul ol ul,
ul ul ul {
list-style: square outside;
}
table{
border-collapse: collapse;
border-spacing: 0;
empty-cells: show;
}
fieldset { border: none; }
You can download the file directly, if you prefer so. After that, restart Firefox, and browse to an old website.
Here is a comparison of the two rendering (before/after).
Before:
After:
Voulant transférer un beau fond d’écran sur mon nouveau téléphone portable Samsung E700, je décrète que les cables usb sont désuet et que je vais utiliser une belle connexion Bluetooth avec du bon cancer dedans que c’est chouette. Tout marche bien jusqu’à au début, ou il faut que j’associe à la main mon périphérique. Je précise que j’utilise le logiciel de Samsung, qui, si il est loin d’être pourri, n’est tout de même pas le top. Outre les boutons skinnés à la moche (c’est dingue le nombre d’applications qui se disent qu’elles vont imposer une skin à l’utilisateur), c’est que du windows pourri et en plus ça bug à moitié. Donc voilà mon téléphone apparié, mais cela ne marche toujours pas. Grâce à mes nombreux neurones encore fonctionnels, je découvre qu’il faut que je crée à la main une connexion COM dans windows. Sitôt dit sitôt fait, sauf que Windows me crache une belle erreur :
Recently, I tried (as many) the recent beta of Safari on Windows. While the experience was far from nice (crashes, problem with rendering…) I noticed something very interesting : Apple is including the latest version of their Lucida Grande font in the package. This is quite nice, because the only version you can usually find on the Internet are old one with some characters missing (most notably the €). This package comes with the 5.0 version which is, I believe, the latest. These fonts are very readable at small font size, so they are a (among some others) perfect choice for a system font. It’s no surprise that the MacOS X desktop looks slick with these fonts. But now you can also have them in you Linux box ! Here are the instructions for Ubuntu, you can adapt them for Debian or your other distro of choice. If you don’t want to extract the font yourself, skip the first part.