Overriding eBay’s Fonts and Styles
Use Cascading Style Sheets to change the look of more than just the description.
The <font>
tag, introduced in [Hack #40], allows
you to set the font for any block of text. But it
won’t have any effect on text outside the
<font></font> structure, which means
you can never control the appearance of any text outside the
description area (e.g., the rest of the auction page). Instead,
you’ll have to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) if
you want to apply your styles to the entire page.
The following code, for instance, will turn all text on the page green:
<style> [1] BODY,FONT,TD,A { [2] font-size: 10pt !important; font-family: Verdana,Arial,Helvetica !important; color: green !important; [3] } </style>
Here’s how it works. First, the
<style></style> structure [1] sets apart our CSS definitions, which will
take effect regardless of where the code is placed on the page. Next,
a single CSS definition [2] lists the HTML
tags to modify with our new styles. In this case, we are applying our
styles to all <body> text, as well as to any
text inside <font></font> tags,
<td></td> tags (used for tables), and
<a></a> tags (used for links). If you
don’t want to modify link colors, for instance, just
remove ,A from line [2].
The actual styles applied are listed between the curly braces
{ }, separated one per line for clarity. This
includes the font size, the typeface, and, of course, our glorious
green color [3]. The
!important keywords ensure that our styles override ...