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Comment by shakna

9 days ago

Being able to change stylesheets, disable or enhance various JavaScript scripts, add notes and annotations, and other things, is exactly the idea of a user agent.

The user makes a request, and then does whatever they like with the answer. Not just whatever is sensible, but whatever they want to do.

If that concept somehow became accepted again... I think the accessible web might well become a solved problem, rather than an endless slog.

In what way is that not currently possible? All browsers I know of you can edit whatever you want in any page you download

  • You'll need to do a bit of work to make it the way it used to be. Editing any text on a page, or having your changes save persistently, needs a bit of a... Framework, to keep things together, rather than being the expected mode of interaction.

    Sure, I can add a p to the tree. But if I refresh, its gone. I'll probably need plugins to keep my own stylesheets and JS changes around.

>Being able to change stylesheets

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/styl-us/

>disable or enhance various JavaScript scripts

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tampermonkey/...

Yeah you can't directly alter scripts being ran (as far as I know?) but you can usually override/extend behavior and can definitely add your own

>add notes and annotations

https://cwmonkey.github.io/greasemonkey/make-note/

(I haven't actually used this one, just first result)

  • I'm aware of plugins. But these used to be builtin features. Developers needed to work with them, rather than making it harder and harder to use them to make the users life easiee.