Inspired by one of Eric A. Meyer’s recent postings to css-discuss, saila.com now has a “CSS Signature” allowing you to re-style this site.

Although more is to come, the convention, bashed-out in a comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets thread is to replace the “dots” in your full domain with hyphens, so www.saila.com becomes www-saila-com. While there are some problems with this (e.g., if you visit the site using www.saila.ca the CSS Signature isn’t intuitive), it’s a good start. If you have a site, whether it uses CSS or not, it’s worth adding your own CSS Signature.

To change the offsite link style at saila.com, for example, just add this rule to your user style sheet:

#www-saila-com .offsite:link { background: #EEE; }

To change the text face:

#www-saila-com, #www-saila-com * { font-family: Georgia, serif; }

My hope is to provide a more detailed breakdown of the available site styles some point in the future.

This of course, is quite similar to what AlltheWeb is doing with its Alchemist tool. Although the service uses custom style sheets, as opposed to user-defined ones, it does allow you to almost every element on the page. And you could win up to US$750 in Amazon.com gift certificates if your style sheet is a winner in the site’s design contest.

Also, A List Apart’s has a helpful piece by Mark Newhouse on taming lists with CSS, and Christopher Schmidt has a new book out, Designing CSS Web Web pages.

(Speaking of books, in various parts of my site, I promo helpful Web design books. But in this ever changing world, there are many new ones out that are not included. Do you have a favourite? If so, let me know.)

One final note, globeinvestor.com has made its long transition over to CSS. Although it still uses tables for layout (legacy issues) and is not yet valid (dB issues), all colouring and text formatting should be done using CSS. No more font means smaller, friendlier pages.