Would it be possible to get plaintext versions of MeTa and AskMe

January 13, 2004 4:56 PM

Would it be possible to get plaintext versions of MeTa and AskMe, which could be tied to our selection of same for MeFi in our profiles?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken to Feature Requests at 4:56 PM (8 comments total)

(sorry if this has been asked before...I couldn't find mention of it)

I'm in an open office situation again at my newish job, and have more free time than I really should, and would love to be a little more...unobtrusive...in my Meta* browsing. I know you're planning (or doing) lots of work for AskMe at the moment, Matt, but maybe it wouldn't be too much work to clone the lofi stylesheet and hook the cookies into our preferences for the main page?
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:00 PM on January 13, 2004

Just to extend on this with a pony of mammoth proportions - would it ever be possible (in terms of server resources and development time) for users to design and store their own stylesheets, either on the metafilter server, or on their own websites and having an option in their user profile where they can set "Use personal stylesheet: http://www.mysite.com/metafilter.css"? On the other hand, if this happened maybe people would have to stop talking about "the blue" and "the grey", incase "the blue" appeared pink to them...
posted by Jimbob at 7:13 PM on January 13, 2004

stavros: lynx & links allow you to browse not only metafilter but much of the web in stealth mode.

Also, on IE, if you open up the tools/preferences/whatever panel and look under the "General Tab" you can find a button for "Accesibility" that allows you to tell the browser to ignore colors, font characteristics, and you can disable images and have them replaced with alt tags under the "Advanced" tag. Accesibility also lets you set your own stylesheets.

Mozilla lets you do this too, minus the stylesheets, I think.

Jimbob: the upshot of the above is, of course, that Right Thing(TM) to do is invent a browser that will let people assign stylesheets to sites.
posted by namespan at 8:31 PM on January 13, 2004

Thanks, but I knew about the IE thing, namespan. I was expecting someone to mention it (shoulda pre-empted). It's come up quite a few times.

If there were a way to enable/disable it on the fly, that'd be cool. I don't believe there is, though. And call me a heretic, but I just don't like Mozilla or Firebird as much as I like my MyIE2 wrapper around the IE renderer.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 9:39 PM on January 13, 2004

Perhaps, then, using MyIE2 for your "real" browser and IE running in anti-decorative mode for stealth browsing?

And you haven't told us why you can't use lynx yet! : )
posted by namespan at 11:05 PM on January 13, 2004

Namespan: I've been waiting for a browser like this for ages - I've been hoping the Opera people might extend the current custom display styles (the ones that let you view pages as if they are in Lynx, or on a Commodore 64) to allow users to add their own CSS files on a site-by-site basis.
posted by Jimbob at 11:12 PM on January 13, 2004

Perhaps, then, using MyIE2 for your "real" browser and IE running in anti-decorative mode for stealth browsing?

Darn good idea, but since MyIE2 is actually just a wrapper for IE, it shares settings with the Demon Browser. Maybe I should grab a copy of Lynx just for Meta*. But it would be easier if Matt would just code up my every whim, though.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 11:51 PM on January 13, 2004

Well, if you just wanted a pony....
posted by namespan at 12:06 AM on January 14, 2004