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Re: turning off style sheets

for

From: Timothy J. Luoma
Date: Oct 25, 2002 12:02PM

Lori K. Brown wrote:

> 1) For the browsers I know, (IE, some Opera, NN old and new,
> Mozilla), one doesn't so much turn stylesheets 'off', as much as one
> substitutes one's own preferences in a given area (larger text, high
> contrast colors, etc.) Is there in fact a way to turn stylesheets
> OFF entirely in modern browsers, or is it always a case of
> substituting some or all of one's own preferences into a local
> stylesheet?

Opera can turn OFF style sheets

File > Preferences > Page Style > Author Mode
uncheck 'Page style sheet' and CSS is gone


I don't know about fully turning OFF style sheets in lesser browsers...

Mozilla can turn OFF colors
Edit> Preferences > Appearance > Use my chosen colors

Internet Explorer can turn OFF colors and fonts

Tools > Options > General > Accessibility >
Ignore colors specified on web pages
Ignore font styles specified on web pages
Ignore font sizes specified on web pages

and of course there are no doubt hacks out there (bookmarklets come to
mind) that let one disable CSS)

> 2) Besides accessibility / colorblindness type issues, is there a
> good reason why a user might be doing this? I'm not trying to be
> snotty, I just honestly want to understand if there's a specific
> need being addressed.

YES! Some people suck at designing web pages! C|Net, for example,
loves to use as small of a font as they can possibly get. Many pages
like to cram as much as they possibly can into a tiny space. alt+G
(toggle styles) and 8 (increase zoom 100%) and I can read any page.

> 3) As long as this is hardcore requirement, isn't CSS-positioning
> completely off the table, or is 'graceful degradation' acceptable?

Graceful degradation (hrm... not a phrase one is likely to hear outside
of web design) is acceptable.

Besides, users can turn off tables too :-)


> If the only reason to bend over backwards to create presentation
> solutions that don't fall over when style sheets are removed is that
> edge-condition nitpickers are going to give you a hard time for it,
> I will be hard to persuade that it's worth the additional effort.

Text-only browsers, screen readers and search engines read your pages
without CSS attached. Of those you might only care about the 3rd, but
they are all good reasons:

see
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_10_presenting_your_main_content_first.html

Text-only browsers, screen readers and search engines are actually
arguments FOR using CSS positioning, because it lets you display the
page how you want on GUI browsers while still being able to get the
information to those using other User Agents.

TjL

--
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