The Web Your Way
Most people thing that how a web page looks and functions is determined by the person who created the web page and that the person visiting the web page just has to accept it the way that it is. They think you can't do anything about it when the page is designed to be too wide to fit across your screen or the text is too small for you to easily read or there are stupid animated effects on the page.
Well that's the way that the web worked back in the early days in the 20th Century but not any more. With the 21st Century web the person visiting web pages can have as much say if not more as to how the page looks as the person who write it does.
Basically there are five parts to a web page that you display in your own web browser. Only three of these five parts come from the web site that you are visiting. The other two parts you can define for yourself. Let's look at what each of these five parts is and what it does/can do.
- HTML - this part of the web page is written by the author of the page and contains the actual content of the page, the information that you are visiting the page for.
- Author Stylesheet - also comes from the web site and is how the author of the page suggests that the page look when it is viewed.
- User Stylesheet - All modern (and even some not so modern) web browsers allow you to define your own stylesheet and attach it into your web browser. This gives you far more control over the way web pages look than the few menu controls available in early browsers (and still available in current browsers). While the web standards say that author stylesheets take precedence over user stylesheets every single web browser gives precedence to user stylesheets over author stylesheets so that if you want all web sites to be 750px wide and use 30px font size to make the text nice and big and easy for you to read you simply set your user stylesheet that way and what the author of the page wants is no longer relevant. You see their content the way you want it to look.
- Javascript - the author of the page adds scripts to enhance the functioning of their web page. Of course some authors also stupidly add scripts to try to restrict what you can do with your browser but this isn't a problem.
- User Javascripts - Modern web browsers not only allow you to define your own stylesheets to be applied to every web page they also allow you to define your own Javascripts too. The Opera web browser has support for user Javascripts built in while with Firefox you just need to install the Greasemonkey extension. Even Internet Explorer has some ability to add user Javascripts if you can get the Turnabout plugin to install. You can use these user Javascripts both to completely disable any stupid Javascripts that the author of the page used to try to restrict you access that your browser doesn't have the ability to disable for itself. You can also add all of the enhancements that the author ought to have used Javascript to add to the web page but didn't include.
Overall the only part of the web page that is under the control of the person who wrote it is the content of the page (the text and images). If you want to view this page in green Marlett 16pt font on a pink background with any table rows alternating in grey and white and the words that you searched for that found the page for you highlighted in yellow then that is your choice. There is nothing I can do to stop you from setting up your own stylesheets and Javascripts to override the ones on this page in order to see the page exactly as you want it.
On the web the author provides the content of the page and suggests how they think it should be displayed. How you actually view it is entirely up to you.
