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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Wait, since when are inline styles a poor development practice? Obviously they're a bad choice for large sites, but for a simple webpage (like a blog) that never needs to be extended and doesn't have repeating elements with lots of formatting, it seems to be a justifiable choice. For blog post content, especially.

Is "!important" in your custom stylesheet not overriding it? It's supposed to, what is the technical problem?

Also, what are fontwalls? You link to a paragraph with a typeface that is exceedingly difficult to read (is that the point?), and then the rest appears to be in hieroglyphics.

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  > Wait, since when are inline styles a poor development
  > practice?

Since always. Well, to be more precise, since <font> had fallen out of style, and separating your content and styling became a best practice.

WAT? Inline styles are always a poor development practice (one that I'm kinda guilty of... dang it).

You are supposed to separate the design from the structure from any logic.

???

1. Code bloat: "font-family: Crimson Text; font-size: 20px; font-weight: 400; line-height: 135%;" appears 9 times. For the same reason in the CSS world we're trying to eliminate unnecessary and unwieldy div-itis and non-semantic classes. It's about reducing footprint: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-BX4N8egEc. If you cannot see the logical next step that each of his Web pages may be doing the exact same thing, and thus his entire site; and further he might be using a plugin or theme that perpetuates this bad practice... if you cannot see that, then fair. But those are the kinds of problems I reflect on in my studies.

2. I'm not even sure what you're getting at with your second question. I wouldn't be posting this if my "!important" worked. If anything, Stylish may not benefit from the well-noted point that !important overrides inline styles. If that's the case: fascinating new problem we've discovered here. I am overriding paragraph elements with "!important"; that is the fact of the situation. Is there a technical problem? Perhaps.

3. Fontwalls are situations like this: a dyslexic reader is incapable of reading the content in place because the typesetting makes it inaccessible. So, like with your criticism of my typesetting on my Website: the OP has used "a typeface that is exceedingly difficult to read."

OK, I'm not really sure you understand CSS and blogs. Blog posts tend to be self-contained documents where the styles have to be inline, because each post might have completely different formatting, and is often generated by a WYSIWYG tool. It's not a problem, it's just how blogs usually work.

And yeah, the !important should be working. I've never used Stylish, but something's clearly broken -- in any case, your beef should be with Stylish or your browser, not with the author/developer of the blog. If you stick to a user stylesheet in your browser it should be guaranteed to work -- after all, that's the whole point of them, so that people with visual disabilities can override default styling.

So, I don't really get what the problem is. Inline styles are an integral part of the web (and are particularly, and correctly, suited to blog posts), and user stylesheets generally allow you to override them, so you can use dyslexic fonts if you choose.

None of what is said in your post is factually correct.

Oh man. You could've at least checked the YouTube video before venturing into accusations of incompetence. I mean, what the BALLS, dude? I'm supposed to keep my cool in communities like this? What is this baseless and graceless intellectual bravado? And I'm the bad guy because I use an intimate style and diction... Eesh, what I've been responding to in this thread, with this particular user, I think it is absolutely fair to say, has just been careless hubris. After I respond with, roughly: mitigating "div-itis and non-semantic classes" he rails me with "I don't think you know what X and Y are". He might as well have added "bro." Again, [BALLS](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7C8GWIV4jzA).

You haven't even tested it, nor do you even really know what Stylish is, it seems, and you're arguing with conviction.

What am I doing here?

Good question.

Clannish, exclusive, cliquish, myopic.

Thanks for the advice. I'll keep my distance then.

I mean no offense, but you're effectively writing a post about how people are neglecting 5-10% of the population who are dyslexics in a font that is utterly unreadable to the other 90-95%. I'm not exactly sure whether that will have the wanted effect.

It's not clear to me what you are trying to say. Accessibility issues have to logically start somewhere.

Do you understand what the wanted effect is? Because I'm pretty sure the gist of this entire discussion is: Don't use inline styles, which any front-end developer worth their salt would already agree to[1], outside of the accessibility debate. But what is more, accessibility might be one of many reasons why a front-end developer would raise the point about inline style at all.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-BX4N8egEc

What I'm trying to say is that you can't make a point about accessibility by making the point (not fully but quite) inaccessible to most people. I agree that this is an issue, but you're not pointing it out in the best way possible. In fact, you're doing exactly what you're trying to get rid of.

What is needed is something like Dyslite[1] but free (and probably better). A browser plugin that overrides font-settings to use dyslexia-optimized fonts. Ranting about inline-styles doesn't help anyone. Clearly, one should be able to override even inline-styles for accessibility rather than forbidding web designers their use, even though I agree it's not exactly a good practice anyway.

Then again, I like to say that there's always a time and place for everything. Damnit even goto's have some valid use cases.

[1] http://dyslite.com

Dyslite is a software product. This is an impromptu conversation on a message board.

If that's what you mean by your concluding comments. Yes, I should be working on software for these issues, and I am; -- but in my morning reading time, my crutch was kicked out from under me. If you want to say that you disagree with my style, that's fine. I disagree with yours. Most people, most of the time, disagree when it comes to details, and certainly, even further, on opinions of style. I'm not going to lose sleep over people disagreeing with my diction. If I did that, then I'd never get any sleep. (That is, I have not, and I will not change my style. I'm being myself, and using my own voice.)

And it still isn't even clear why this is the case, that my Stylish "!important" overrides are not overriding the inline styles of that Web page. I've provided a link to my post which contains my Stylish snippet. You can see it for yourself, that this should not be happening, given the rules of CSS Specificity.

It sounds like you should complain to the developers of Stylish or your browser.

You could also try writing a user script that deletes all font-related styles from all elements.

Does running that post through the Readable or Readability bookmarklets leave the inline styles intact?

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