[Previous entry: "The Con Is On"] [Next entry: "From Murphy's Lore, 5th edition"] One of the most important tenets of good user interface design is consistency. If someone tries to break the consistency of your user interface (whether by malice, incompetence or apathy), and you can do something about it, wouldn't you?

Several of my friends and acquantainces, who will remain nameless, have considerable amounts of graphic design talent, but apparently no familiarity with this concept of consistency. They like to use the CSS2 'cursor' attribute to change what sort of cursor is displayed when you put it above links, titles, borders, backgrounds, or anything else you can select using CSS.

I don't know why, but this irritates me beyond belief. I finally got around to writing a little bit of CSS override that Firefox and SeaMonkey users can utilise to forever prevent anyone changing their hand pointer to a giant north-west move arrow, for example (why? why would you want that?).

The override is available at http://zanchey.ucc.asn.au/overrides/cursor.css, and needs to be inserted into your userContent.css file. If you've never done that before, the Mozilla documentation for editing Firefox configuration files has a good explanation - remember, it needs to go into userContent.css.

Comments are welcome, either by e-mail or commenting on this post. In particular, I'd like to know how I can override all cursors on the page (not just the commonly-abused links and form-fields). I have an abortive attempt, which I cannot get working, at http://zanchey.ucc.asn.au/overrides/cursor.2.css

2 comments

/.Church :: Monday, July 24th

I am so changing that right now.....sorry David :-(

Pen :: Monday, July 24th

You know you love me!