O'Reilly Network: The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook

O'Reilly Network: The CSS Anarchist's Cookbook

Standards are good things, and they should be used for the benefit of the Web. I know that. But I was reading Tap the Power of Mozilla's User Stylesheets, by Andrew Wooldridge of Netscape, when I felt this eerie tickle on the back of my neck. It turned out to be my wife teasing me, but at the same time, I was getting ... thoughts. Ideas. Bad ideas. And once it started, I couldn't stop it. Oh, I tried. I kept telling myself that CSS should never be used for evil. That in the wrong hands, it could wreak havoc upon the face of the Web as we know it.

Then I thought, what the heck, it's not like anyone can hack servers with CSS. So I gave in and joined the dark side. Once joined, I felt the need to lure others into the same trap. Sure, it's evil, but what can you do?

So now I come to you with news of weapons of great destruction. Using common browsers and a little ingenuity, we can erode and explode look-and-feel as we know it. The Web will never look the same again. How will we unleash this awesome force? Simple user stylesheets. These seemingly innocuous files can be used to:

* Subvert FONT formatting
* Eliminate FONT tags completely
* Crack tables apart
* Blank out tables entirely
* Knock table cells out of alignment
* Eliminate ad banners
* Reduce images to almost nothing
* Highlight active images, or get rid of non-active ones