@usgmr writes:
Woah, oneechan noticed me. haha. Anyway, right! Totally forgot to include !important on the post. It sucks how they actually put this into the whole DOM at all. I mean display: none !important works alright without the hack bec their display attr doesn’t have !important. So does that mean they’re alright with themes hiding it but not repositioning it? And I wish on the documentation. It’s not even complete. {PermalinkPagination} and {ReblogURL} aren’t even there when they’re so useful.
It’s arguably impossible for Tumblr to keep someone from overriding their CSS, in this case. Practically speaking, there’s an infinitude of ways to make selectors more specific by matching on attribute values. The way I see it – and this is just my blind speculation – Tumblr’s motivation for choosing to override the rules they have is mostly driven by two practical considerations.
First, they’d like to override older stylesheets that don’t take the new
control style into account. People tend not to apply !important to
their CSS declarations without a good reason, after all. So they pick
the two rules that are most likely to be changed by themes, and change
those back.
After that, Tumblr wants to make it difficult enough to override the positioning that most developers won’t bother to do so, in what I presume are the interests of consistency. Hence the very specific selectors. I have to admit that if Dichotomy’s navigation wasn’t fixed in the top right corner of the viewport, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed.
On the principle of it, though, I think this approach is entirely wrongheaded. I’d rather Tumblr make things like the controls an explicit part of theme customization, and simply encourage designers to take them into account when creating themes. The fact that they operate the Theme Garden gives them quite a bit of leverage in encouraging themes not to hide the standard controls – they already do this for other aspects of a theme’s design. The “my way or the highway” attitude doesn’t work well when, ultimately, you’re literally giving the user full control over the page’s stylesheets.