Setting Up a User Stylesheet to View the COTH Bulletin Board
Most major browsers support a feature called User Stylesheets. A user stylesheet lets you create a set of rules that governs the appearance of web content as it arrives at the browser, and your user selections then take precedence over the rules specified in the page itself by the authors. The original purpose for this feature is to improve web accessiblity -- people who have visual impairments can make all the text larger all the time, for example, or can adjust background colors to improve contrast and readability.
Modern web pages use style sheets not just to control colors and type faces, but to position content elements on the page and to control behavior and structure. So, the ability to modify the style of pages as they are rendered in your browser is quite powerful. Modifying the presentation of a large and complex web application, however, is not entirely easy for folks who aren't experienced at writing and editing CSS. COTH's site has about 4 different stylesheets in effect at any one time, hundreds of lines of code. Yikes!
I wrote this stylesheet to assist other COTH users in having a more harmonious user friendly experience of the site. Unfortunately, the COTH moderators have chosen to regard my offer of assistance to my fellow COTHers as a hostile act. While I am willing to state that the site redesign was in my professional opinion poorly thought out and implemented, I am not in fact hostile at all, other than being hostile at being told not to share harmless technical information and expertise with my fellow horse fans. If you find COTHFix.css useful, wonderful. See you on line and on your horse.
How to Use COTHFix.css in FireFox
- Download the file COTHFix.css to your desktop or someplace you can find it again: COTHFix.css
- Install the 'Stylish' FireFox add-on from here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2108
You must then Restart Firefox for Stylish to run. - After you restart FireFox, you will now see a little gray 'S' in the bottom right hand corner of your FireFox window. Click it!
- In the window that appears, click the button that says "Write New Style". Give your new style "COTH" for a name, and then copy the contents of COTHFix.css into the "New Style" text area.(Don't open COTHFix.css in MS Word! Open it in a plain text editor like notepad!)
- Save your new COTH style.
- You will now see the new user style as an option in the 'Stylish' window. It is automatically enabled after you create it. Close the window.
- COTH should now present a layout that is 100% wide with no right hand panel, no green margins, and a nice big text editing box.
- When you are done using COTH, click the Stylish "S" in the bottom right corner and disable the COTH styles. Re-enable this stylesheet when ever you want to use COTH.
How to Implement COTHFix.css for Internet Explorer
- Just as for FireFox, download the COTHFix.css file to your computer, saving it someplace you can find it again.
- In Internet Explorer, go to Tools > Internet Options > and press the button at the bottom right of that dialog box labeled "Accessibility".
- In the new dialog box, check the box labeled "Format documents using my stylesheet". After you check this box, the box below stops being grayed out, and you can browse and upload your COTHFix.css file.
- As soon as you do this, click OK twice, and you will be using the COTHFix.css stylesheet.
- Here's the catch -- every time you want to use this stylesheet to view COTH's BB, you have to turn the stylesheet on (and off when you're done) using this method. IE doesn't have a slick mechanism for invoking and disabling a set of user stylesheets the way that Firefox does. So this is a clunkier technique for IE, sorry.
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Thanks for your support, COTHers. Happy webbing.