Carnal Reason

A web page is not a sheet of paper. That is a lesson that many web designers paid dearly to learn. In the days of yore, (say five years ago) web designers frequently came from the world graphic design. They were used to complete control over every element of design, including fonts, colors, and spacing. They fought titanic battles to impose the same level of control over their new medium, with varying results. Their nemeses were largely accidental. Designers couldn’t guarantee that the prospective user’s computer would have the fonts the designer wanted to display. They could not force browsers (especially IE) to implement CSS correctly. That kind of thing.

The real issue, the one that is essential rather than accidental, stayed dormant for the most part. It is this: the designer’s web page is displayed by the user’s computer. The user can, if he choses to, modify that page in unpredictable ways. Most users did not avail themselves of this option, except in fairly trivial ways such as changing font sizes. Non-trivial changes required skill and effort. Enter Greasemonkey.

Greasemonkey is a free Firefox extension (think plugin) that allows the user to easily run scripts that modify websites on the fly. There are growing libraries of free scripts which are a breeze to install and can do extremely interesting and useful things.

Currently Greasemonkey is available only for Firefox, but it is only a matter of time before IE acquires similar capability. It must, or it will lose ground to Firefox in a way that Microsoft cannot allow. To use a military metaphor, Firefox has just acquired nuclear weapons. IE will have to match it or die.

Posted on May 26th, 2005 by pwyll
Filed under: General