GreaseMonkey

Google Groups' pages are localized (automatically? nice in principle, but can't I choose not to?), in this case entire layout flipped to right-to-left (RTL) for Hebrew (though I prefer English), but navigation side-bar floats right, overlaying content. Clearly a (CSS?) bug.

A GreaseMonkey script can surely patch this bug, temporarily.

  1. Known solution? Hasn't this been fixed already?
  2. Diagnosis: where/when bug occurs, DOM, CSS.
    1. Where: all groups' pages, because it's the site-wide layout that's broken.
    2. DOM and CSS analysis: DOM (HTML) looks nice and clean (content unencumbered with styling), navigation side-bar (in <div class="rf">) precedes content (which is in a <table>). A quick & dirty fix: change (using Firebug) the "rf" class's "float" property from "right" to "left". The rule to fix is in an external stylesheet, http://groups.google.com/groups/style.css?ig=1&amp;stock=0&amp;av=2&amp;v=580, which was imported in the document's head with a CSS "@import". This only fixes the layout — styling such as borders and padding stay broken; ugly but usable.
    3. Note the entire page is marked up <html dir="rtl">. Shouldn't this have flipped everything already? Is this really a browser bug, not Google's? Check the CSS specification. Anyway, the bug is there.
  3. Fix
    1. Create a GreaseMonkey script
    2. Inject a rule into the navigation side-bar's HTML using the "style" attribute; this has higher precedence than (which?) stylesheet rules.

Notes

(None.)

(Appending notes disabled temporarily.)

Last modified 2009-06-12 18:19:45 +0000