Wednesday, February 08, 2006

Your Security Measures Annoy Me

It seems that today, LJ is putting Cascading Style Sheets [CSS] files through a proxy. And filtering out CSS files that have instructions to include other CSS files.

I have a number of blogs and pages. They all share the same look, something I call Brand FJ!!, because they all pull their style sheets from the same directory on exonome.com . It is a carefully managed structure of styles being broken down into small files, some referencing each-other, so that on every website I can import the pieces I need to make it all look similar. When I decide to make a change, this way the change propagates to all sites, and the brand is updated here, on my own pages, and on my various other inter-and intranet blogs.

LJ will no longer allow users to use CSS files that reference other CSS files. The CSS files are no longer loaded directly, when LJ serves a page it rewrites the import header
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.exonome.com/css/default.css" type="text/css" />
into
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://cssproxy.livejournal.com/? u=http://www.exonome.com/css/default.css" type="text/css" />
making the stylesheet be examined through this new proxy. If I enter http://www.exonome.com/css/default.css in my url bar, I get the CSS code. If I enter http://cssproxy.livejournal.com/? u=http://www.exonome.com/css/default.css I get
/* suspect CSS: import rule */

I've got some work to do to fix this. If I can. Having to unravel all my imports may hurt.