Minor issue with metafilter CSS.

July 8, 2005 8:33 AM

Minor issue with metafilter CSS. I use Safari, and have defined a custom CSS file to handle some default styling. For whatever reason, this forces most--but not all--*.metafilter.com links to appear in the link color I've defined; the boilerplate links at the top and bottom appear in Matt's intended yellow. I think that by adding the typical a:link etc selectors to MeFi's CSS would do the trick. It's possible I've done something goofy in my own CSS, I suppose.

This is a problem at a handful of other sites, but I notice it most at MeFi, because the lack of contrast makes links almost unreadable.
posted by adamrice to Bugs at 8:33 AM (10 comments total)

Does adding an !important fix anything? The pseudo-selectors create some weird inheritance issues sometimes; if it were code I had control over, I'd tweak it. If it's someone else's, the sledgehammer approach is ok by me.
posted by yerfatma at 8:47 AM on July 8, 2005

If you take a copy of a page and then change the CSS yourself, you could test and make sure the a:link fix would work.
It may alleviate the barefacedness of this pony: "please change MeFi because my CSS doesn't like it."


Sadly, I can't think of a more witty solution for the owners of barefaced ponies.
posted by NinjaPirate at 8:52 AM on July 8, 2005

Adding an a:link selector (and other a:whatever) to the MeFi CSS does fix the problem. I think the problem here may be that Matt is using CSS for some stuff, but using old-school color attributes in the BODY tag to define the page's basic colors. Apparently Safari has an order of priority for styling a page that goes something like this:

1. Page's own CSS
2. User's CSS
3. Page's own old-school color attributes.

So my CSS is overriding the page's anchor-tag coloring (since I've defined those), but is not overriding the CSS Matt's defined for the boilerplate top and bottom, and is not overriding the text and bg colors for this page (since I have not defined those).
posted by adamrice at 10:37 AM on July 8, 2005

the !important thing should work as well, there is some hard coded color on the mefi user pages and using a custom stylesheet that has !important overrides to those does work.
posted by jessamyn at 10:51 AM on July 8, 2005

Not sure how !important would help here. If anything, I'd prefer to mark these styling rules as "unimportant" (not that it's possible), to give sites like this a chance to override them. The problem is that I am overriding some colors (links) but not others (background and text), leaving me with little contrast .

The MeFi CSS does define background and text colors for the body, so without defining those in my CSS and using !important on them (which I don't want to do), I'm kinda stuck. I suppose if Matt added a class or ID to the body tag, I could gin up some site-specific CSS.

I don't think that what I'm asking for here is a particularly extravagant pony.
posted by adamrice at 11:22 AM on July 8, 2005

I'm still confused as to what specifically you are asking for. A class name on menu links? a new id somewhere? huh?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:43 PM on July 8, 2005

Matt--

Sorry for not being clearer. I'm suggesting that you add rules for styling "a:link" and "a:visited" (and any other a: pseudo-selectors you like) to the CSS on *.metafilter.com.
posted by adamrice at 2:19 PM on July 8, 2005

There already are styles for the anchor colors in the default CSS sheet.

Are you asking for something different?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:25 PM on July 8, 2005

This is really weird. I don't see anything in the source code for this page that loads default.css. I see the CSS rules in the style element on this page, and a lot of style attributes on other tags, but nothing invoking an outside stylesheet.

I guess I'm not asking for something different...but now I'm wondering where default.css comes into play.
posted by adamrice at 2:48 PM on July 8, 2005

it's only used on www.metafilter.com. I never got around to rewriting the header into CSS for metatalk and ask metafilter.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 9:19 PM on July 8, 2005