eating cucumbers without permission...

More for the “yet another thing I would’ve already known if I’d bothered to read the spec” file: you can override inline styling — including <font> tags — from a CSS stylesheet.

A rule’s precedence is determined by its specificity, and an inline style’s specificity is very high. But !important rules take precedence over everything.

If stuck with HTML like this, for example:

<p style="font-color: pink;">I love pink!</p>

It’s still possible to override it with an !important rule:

p {
    /* I hate pink. */
    color: black !important;
}

And yes, it even works with <font> elements. If faced by some ghastly, antediluvian monstrosity of a web-page, a hideous Lovecraftian twisting-together of content and presentation newly crawled from a dark pit at the far edge of the Web –

<p><font color="pink">Pink! And Ponies!</font></p>

– it can be easily dealt with:

font {
    color: black !important;
}

Or, with a browser capable of more advanced selections…

font[color="pink"] {
    color: black !important;
}

It doesn’t seem like a particularly useful thing to know, but it’s a godsend for styling other people’s nasty HTML. In my case, the particular problem was that LiveJournal’s dynamically-generated quick-reply form contains this:

<table style="border: 1px solid black;">

Dealing with S2 is bad enough without further frustration on the CSS front, and I really hated that border. Hooray for !important!

The time came around for my annual-or-thereabouts LiveJournal redesign; the result is this style. For want of a better name, it’s called “Zesty“. There’s a real dearth of S2 layouts out there¹ so I figured I might as well make it public.

The code isn’t great in parts, and the CSS is worse; but hey, as long as it works, right?

Here is an example of an entry page.

While I’m at it, I threw some other random LiveJournal-related things up there too: my previous style and my notes on un- or poorly-documented features. It’s for my own reference, but someone else might find it useful.

1. It might have something to do with the fact that S2 is too complicated for non-programmers and too crippled to be fun for anyone who’s used to a language that doesn’t suck. What a winning combination: a system no good for anyone. ↩